The New Supermodel Supermarket : Since the Fall of the Wall, Scouts for the World’s Top Modeling Agencies Have Found Eastern Europe to be a Treasure Trove of Looks That Kill--and Sell.

Midnight at the trendy Transylvania Club in Bucharest. In the downstairs Dracula Room, plates of meat-stuffed grape leaves have been cleared away by solicitous waiters, backing out the door as is the Romanian custom. A new bottle of local Cabernet Sauvignon is opened. China cups of coal-black coffee arrive.

Dominique Caffin places 16 Polaroid photographs of young Romanian women on the red tablecloth in front of her. An international scout for the Ford Models agency, this Frenchwoman is, at 38, respected throughout the industry for her keen eye and her successful searches for models in Eastern Europe. For every statuesque woman yearning for fame, fortune and a ticket to the West, Caffin is the dream maker.

This day she is tired. She’s been on the road for three weeks. Estonia. The Czech Republic. Slovakia. Bulgaria. Several thousand faces. Six “maybe” models. And now Romania.

She gazes at the photos, the finalistas in the first Romanian Supermodel of the Year contest. Each has been hand-picked by Giani Portmann, co-owner of a Bucharest modeling agency, during a grueling, 3,000-mile, 10-city casting call across Romania.

Portmann, chain-smoking thin cigarettes, already has chosen her favorites. But she keeps them to herself, watching nervously.

“Adina,” Caffin says. “She is very pretty, very pretty, this Adina. Brigette ... special. Simona ... I like Simona.”

“She’s magnificent, but there is one problem with Simona,” Portmann says. “Her chin is too sharp.”

“That’s terrible,” says Caffin. “Her profile? That’s terrible. But I adore that face.”

Next. “Ioana ... that’s a beautiful face.”

Caffin pauses. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “I’m extremely surprised. They all have the ABCs. They are tall, they have good bone structure and they have great bodies. It’s unbelievable. Bravo!”

But the cutting must begin. Monica is too poorly proportioned. Ana’s mouth is too small. Lumenitza has patchy skin. Bianca has an elongated torso, “a low rear end; that will never work,” Caffin says. Finally, just two photos remain--Ioana and Simona.

“I love this Simona,” Caffin says. “This is what I look for. It’s a cover image. You can’t cut her chin?”

Portmann shakes her head sadly.

“And this Ioana,” Caffin says, “she is magnificent. How old is she?”

“Fifteen and a half,” Portmann says.

“She can be a winner,” says Caffin. “She is very Ford. We have to think of Eileen Ford, you know, and this one is perfect for the agency. She has the graine de star .” The seed of stardom.

Two nights later, on June 10, in the velveted, old Victoria Casino Theater in Bucharest, in front of a television audience of 10 million Romanians, Ioana (yoh-ANN-ah) Delcea, 5-foot-8 with thick, dark hair, becomes the first Romanian Supermodel of the Year. Simona Haragha, chin and all, is the runner-up. Both pack their bags for an escape to the West, and the big time.

“Ioana is a classical beauty, and with such big eyes,” Caffin says later, explaining the decision that baffled many Romanians in the audience, who prefer a mature, voluptuous look. “So elegant and graceful. And mysterious. We have to see what people say about her nose. But if it’s a problem, we’ll do something about it.”

But, Portmann warns, “it’s not enough that she be beautiful. That, yes, of course. So many are beautiful. But can she handle it in the West?”

*

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the crumbling of communist governments in Eastern Europe opened a new market for Western entrepreneurs. They charged past the mortar, opening McDonald’s restaurants and Coca-Cola franchises. They installed Otis elevators and IBM computers. They sold Estee Lauder perfume and Panasonic television sets.

Those developments did not go unremarked in the world’s top modeling agencies in New York and Paris. Who could imagine the number of beautiful faces and prominent cheekbones hidden, like diamonds, in the remote villages of more than 20 countries? New places, the scouts knew, could only mean new faces.

In fact, Dominique Caffin was already there. Working for a small Paris modeling agency, she had made her first face-hunting trip behind the Iron Curtain in 1988. The hotels were (and still are) grimy. She sometimes needed bodyguards (and still does). Visas were difficult to obtain. There were few fashion magazines and most of the successful local models were over 30, advanced old age in this business.

But it was all worth it. On that first trip, to Prague, she found Eva Herzigova, 16, and Daniela Pestova, 17. Herzigova is now the fashion plate for Guess? and Wonderbra, as Pestova is for Victoria’s Secret. She also appeared this year on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine’s swimsuit edition. Now they fly on the Concorde, skip to Paris and Milan and earn well over $1 million a year.

For every Pestova, there are hundreds of models such as Malvina Zielinska, an 18-year-old Polish model based in Paris who is, in the idiom of the business, “building her book,” struggling to launch a career. And for every Zielinska, there are tens of thousands of young women like Ioana--15, 16 or 17 years old--who yearn to be models.

Caffin’s discovery of Herzigova and Pestova turned Eastern Europe into the rich new frontier for model prospectors. Now the glossy picture books of the two top agencies, Elite and Ford, are filled with models from Eastern Europe. Of Elite’s 54 top models in New York, seven are from former Eastern Bloc countries, and more are on the verge of breaking into the top ranks. By some industry estimates, nearly 25% of all the female models working today are from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Elite opened a Vienna office this summer to cover eight affiliated agencies in the region and recruit contestants for the Elite Model Look competition. Ford uses its 4-year-old Paris branch to coordinate its agency network and sponsor Supermodel contests in the east.

“Our business is totally about how someone looks,” explains Katie Ford, chief executive officer of Ford Models Inc., the company her parents founded in their home in 1946. “People don’t care where a model comes from. But these girls from Eastern Europe have such a sense of grace and style. And those bones! I am so serious. Their faces look chiseled, and that translates into a picture that is very photogenic. They also tend to have very big eyes, which makes them a photographer’s dream.”

“The thing that surprises me,” says John Casablancas, owner of Elite, “is that they are all so tall. I always thought women from Eastern Europe would be stocky. In fact, they have incredibly long legs and are very slender. They have the perfect profile for modeling.” And, as one Paris booking agent puts it, “It’s in the genes.”

Ultimately, though, a model’s success depends not on genes or agencies, but on the tastemakers--photographers, magazine editors and advertising executives--who hire her. Two of the most important people in that business are the bookings editors at New York’s Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and those powerbrokers find the new arrivals a welcome, hard-working addition.

“To me, a great girl is a great girl, and great models come from everywhere,” says Preston Westenburg, Vogue’s 33-year-old bookings editor. “But what is so exciting about Eastern European girls is that they were inaccessible. And they’re great because they’re being introduced to a whole new world. They’re excited and eager to work, and that’s always a nice element. You can see that naivete, which is very charming.”

Charming, yes, but still difficult to find. Legitimate local model agencies in Eastern Europe are small. And many of these countries are polluted by prostitution rings operating under the guise of modeling agencies in the new capitalist free-for-all. Hundreds, if not thousands, of guileless young women have been sent abroad for nefarious profit, and local newspapers in the east are filled with their sad stories of exploitation.

Moreover, once a prospect is selected, she quickly finds out that visas to France and the United States, the two top modeling markets, are notoriously difficult to obtain for Eastern Europeans who want to work in the West. “We sometimes have to prove that they are models, and you can’t prove it until they come here and start working,” sighs Iris Minier, a scout in Ford’s Paris office. “I have this girl, Marianne, in Estonia. The poor kid is so beautiful. But we can’t get her into France, and the United States Embassy won’t even talk about her. Now we’re trying London. It’s just a shame.”

When they do get a visa, many arrive in Paris or New York speaking no French or English. The culture shock for a small-town girl from, say, Transylvania, is real. (“I just saw a Pontiac!” one Bulgarian model told Caffin.) More than a few quickly return home.

“Once they get out of the country, you have to form them 100%,” Minier says. Money must be advanced for tickets and housing, and chaperons hired. Makeup artists, hairstylists and even dentists and plastic surgeons are sometimes needed. Smaller agencies are hard-pressed to invest in anything less than a sure thing. And modeling agents know there are no sure things in pretty faces. As a result, agency bookers often become mothers, best friends and confessors to the new arrivals.

“We tell them how to dress, how to make themselves up and how to act,” says Brigitte Honorich, a Ford booking agent in Paris. “A lot of them are like children at play. So enthusiastic. But they have so much to learn about this business.”

Dominique Caffin is fully aware that she must choose wisely, given what both the agency and the budding model must face. “I think one finds more interesting faces in the east, and they bring something really new to the fashion world. But it is at a higher cost,” Caffin says. “In the east, you have to advance everything. The plane ticket. Meals. No one has any money.” Being wrong can also devastate a young girl, so she takes care.

In Slovenia this year, for example, not one of the finalists in the Supermodel of the Year contest had a prayer of competing in the big time. Caffin picked a winner but withheld the standard promise of a free trip to the Supermodel finals in the United States this fall. “She was a monster,” Caffin says, adding, “We call them a monster when they are not so good.”

“I’m not looking for a girl who can make 1,000 marks a day in Germany,” Caffin says. “I can find girls like that every day. I’m looking for the graine de star . And there is a big difference between the commercial girl and the graine de star . But if I find just one of those, it’s enough for me. It makes the whole trip worthwhile.”

Even then, she says, “we have to handle them very carefully.” They are vulnerable, and the chance of success, even for those who make it to Paris or New York, is small. “We have to protect them more than, say, a Swedish girl,” she says. “They are very fragile, and I’m not allowed to make a mistake because this is a career. When I choose a 16-year-old and send her to the West, I have to be right.”

*

Daniela Pestova is living the dream of all the starry-eyed young women in Eastern Europe. Seven years ago, she walked in late to a screening of the movie “Wall Street” in Prague, and Caffin, then a scout for the Madison agency in Paris, caught a glimpse of her.

“I was shocked when I saw her,” Caffin remembers. “She was, and still is, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life. Usually, when you meet a girl, you know you will have to change her. Maybe she has to lose 20 pounds or change her hair. But I saw that this girl could become a model in 30 seconds.”

A week later, Pestova was on a plane bound for Paris. “My dad was worried,” Pestova says recently, sipping decaffeinated coffee in New York. “He knew something must be wrong if I could get a visa in a week. Nothing happens that fast in my country.”

Pestova is not yet a supermodel, but she’s big enough that John Casablancas spent two years luring her from her small New York agency to Elite, succeeding in May. “She is truly one of the most beautiful women in the world,” he says. “She’s got the look. She’s smart. Now what we have to do is shake her up a bit and bring out the greatness in her.”

By most standards, Pestova already is a success. Take a recent week’s schedule. On Monday, she’s in New York for a Victoria’s Secret shoot. The next day she flies to Jackson Hole, Wyo., for another session. On Thursday, she’s in Tucson, Ariz., posing for the cover of the British Marie Claire magazine. On Friday, she takes the overnight flight back to New York and is being shot for the cover of Glamour on Monday morning.

“It’s going well, knock on wood,” she says, tapping her knuckles on the tabletop. “But I’m still shocked. In our business, it’s all luck. It’s timing and having the right haircut. Timing is more important than the perfect nose or the perfect lips.”

But Pestova clearly has something special. Serge Simon, the creative director in Paris for a division of the advertising giant McCann-Erickson, whose clients include American Express and Guy Laroche, says she is “really above the average beauty. She is very classy. She has something that Grace Kelly had.”

Pestova, now 24, seems remarkably untouched by her fame, which was boosted by the Sports Illustrated cover and the headline: “Daniela Glistens in Bermuda.” The model, who has a reputation for being prompt and professional turns up on time the other day for an interview in the Fashion Cafe, newly opened by her businessman husband, Tommaso Buti, and supermodels Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell and Elle Macpherson. She wears a long white T-shirt and jeans, her blond hair tied in a pony tail, and her conversation is pleasantly spiced with idiomatic English, a language she learned only after coming to the Big Apple in 1990.

“When I first arrived in New York, I was always getting lost in cabs because I couldn’t even say the addresses properly,” she says, laughing. “And then, when I began to learn, I was so goofy. I’d keep saying front-head instead of forehead and nobody ever corrected me. It was embarrassing.”

“Girls like me from the east, we don’t know what to expect in this business,” she continues. “American girls have studied the magazines and they know how to pose, how to do ‘the look.’

“I found that you have to be bubbly. I used to go on jobs and say nothing. I didn’t know you have to talk to get the jobs. It makes the client feel more comfortable. Me, if I don’t have anything to say, I don’t talk.”

Pestova grew up in Teplice (teh-PLETE-zah) in what is now the Czech Republic. Her father works in a glass factory, her mother in a jewelry store. Pestova never dreamed of becoming a model because, under the communist regime, models tended to be older and poorly paid.

“The image of modeling in my country is not very pure,” she says. “My father’s co-workers couldn’t believe that he would let his daughter work as a model.” But when she told him how much she was earning, he felt better. Much better.

“The money was very exciting in the beginning,” she says. “Every week, I would call up my father and say, ‘Look, Dad, I made in a day what you make in a year.’ Then, pretty soon, it was 30 times what he made in a year.”

The family remains close. Her brother, Paul, lives in New York. He is 19 and trying to become--what else?--a model. Her parents remain in the Czech Republic, but Pestova visits often, always bringing her magazine covers for her mother, who has filled one room of the house with them. When she appeared on the cover of the Czech version of Elle magazine last year, her brother says, “Dad was the happiest person in the whole country.”

Last year, Pestova married Buti, 28, and they live in a top-floor apartment in midtown Manhattan that has 270-degree views of Central Park. It’s a far cry from her early days, when she shared a small apartment with another aspiring model.

“When people recognize you, that’s the great part,” she says. “But I’m not sure I want to be, like, real famous. I know Claudia [Schiffer] and I can’t see myself living like that. At the level I’m at right now, I’m recognizable in our business, I make a lot of money, I get a lot of covers. But I still have my privacy. I think that’s best.”

*

When Ford scout Iris Minier first saw 17-year-old Malvina Zielinska during a casting call in Warsaw, Poland, she said, “Oh my God, you have to go with me, you have to take a plane with me tonight!” But Zielinska finished school, heading for Paris a few months later.

That was a year ago, and stardom is still a ways off for the tall, strong-willed, quick-tempered 18-year-old.

Each morning, Zielinska receives a fax from her agency at her Paris apartment, listing what she calls the day’s “go-and-sees.” She slips on a black miniskirt and stiletto heels and heads for the Metro. For all except the top stars, the life of a model is a daily grind of racing from appointment to appointment, to be looked up and down by prospective clients.

“If you want to be a model, if you want to do something really important for your career, you have to spend a lot of time in Paris first,” Zielinska says. “This is where people can see your face and you can work.”

“Girls from Eastern Europe sometimes don’t know what this means, exactly, to be a model,” she says. “They imagine girls with high heels and full makeup in miniskirts. So when I go back home, in my blue jeans and Doc Martens, they’re like, ‘You’re a model? It’s impossible.’ This world is really different from what they imagine. It’s really hard work.”

In fact, Zielinska herself had that attitude when she arrived in Paris. It would be glamorous and easy money, she figured. “But after a year I realize this is not fun,” she says. “At night, I’m so tired I have to put my feet in hot water. It’s tough because you always have to look good.”

Nevertheless, there are rewards, primarily financial. “The biggest surprise for me is that now I can buy most of the things I want,” she says. “And I can call my mom and say, ‘Come spend a week with me in Paris,’ and it’s no problem.”

Zielinska was born in Gdynia (ge-DIN-e-a). She lived with her mother, a makeup artist, after her parents divorced. While she was sleeping on a bench at the train station in Warsaw, the head of the reputable Eastern Model Agency recruited the art student, promising that Zielinska would become, in her words, “a huge supermodel.”

She went to Paris, then to New York, and recently back to Paris, where she has an American boyfriend. Any culture shock so far? Hardly. “People in the east told me, ‘Oh, you’ll be in shock. Paris is such a beautiful city,”’ she recalls. “Well, excuse me, I’m not in shock. It’s just imagination that girls from Eastern Europe have a hard time. The language, maybe. But we can learn English, no problem.”

Although her career hasn’t yet soared, she’s traveled to many fashion shows and appeared in dozens of magazines. And she takes the business seriously, sometimes too seriously. She exploded the other day when a worker at Ford in Paris told her he had been unable to locate copies of her latest magazine work. But that strong ambition gives hope to Zielinska’s agent, Brigitte Honorich.

“These girls can be very difficult because they have this drive,” Honorich says. “They’ve lived in a country where nothing was easy, and when they get here, everything is a matter of life and death.

“When you tell a British girl that a client has canceled a shoot, she says, ‘OK.’ An American girl says, ‘We’ll get it next time.’ But these Polish girls demand to know why. They are tough on the outside, but they have a big heart. Part of my job is to make them understand that it’s just a business. You can have fun, too.”

“The big thing about this business,” Zielinska says, “is that you grow up real fast and it changes you so much. You become really serious. Not like a baby anymore. But that’s good. You have to grow up one day.”

*

In the Eastern European frontier, Romania has to be the remote outland. Four decades of communism impoverished the nation, but it was the last 24 years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Stalinist rule that very nearly broke its spirit. Before 1989, when Ceausescu and his wife were arrested and publicly executed, Romania’s 22 million people rarely spoke to foreigners, fearing that the secret police would be listening. The country has been slow to recover from that economic and psychological trauma.

Soon after the fall of communism, the task of searching for models in Romania fell to Giani Portmann, a tall brunette of 43. As a fashion model under the old regime, she earned the equivalent of $2 a day, trying on clothes for the state-run factory. But she left the country for Paris with her French husband 20 years ago to work in the fashion-modeling business and met Dominique Caffin. Now she divides her time between Paris and Bucharest, where she co-owns the country’s largest modeling agency, representing 100 men and women.

The more she works in Paris, the more Portmann believes that Romanian women can succeed in international modeling. The country is brimming with tall, dark-haired girls, more masculine than feminine, with high cheekbones, solid bodies and strong characters.

But Portmann knows these potential models are hidden in the small villages of this, the least-urbanized country in Europe, unable to afford a 300-mile trip to the capital of Bucharest. So, with the Ford agency’s imprimatur, she organizes a caravan to find finalists for the country’s first Supermodel contest.

She travels 3,000 miles in four weeks, stopping in 10 towns across the country, from the verdant central hills of Transylvania to the encircling Carpathian Mountains and, finally, to the vast plains near the borders. At each stop, she launches her appeal in radio and newspaper interviews. People are wary, having heard of disreputable model scouts who have sent unsuspecting girls into prostitution in faraway lands. But many recognize Portmann from her own days as a model, and the name of the Ford agency carries extra weight.

“I cannot say we’ll make anyone a star,” Portmann tells local reporters. “But come and see what this job is about.” More than 200 girls, often skipping school, show up on casting-call day in each village. One girl even asks Portmann to sign her school excuse form.

Still, overcoming cultural misconceptions is difficult. In one Transylvanian village, a peasant woman, hands roughened and face tanned from years in the fields, offers Portmann six eggs as a gift, in hopes of persuading the scout to take her daughter. Portmann pauses in surprise, not knowing what to say. The woman, sensing that the eggs aren’t enough, quickly adds: “I can bring you the chicken, too. It produces two eggs a day.”

Portmann doesn’t take the eggs or the girl. “She’s pretty, but she’s still too young and too small,” she tells the mother. “I don’t want to give you false hope.”

Portmann collects instant photographs and video pictures of 100 of the most promising girls and sends them to Ford. Together, the scouts winnow them to 16 and invite the finalists to the Supermodel contest in Bucharest.

From the beginning, Portmann thinks the most-promising face belongs to Ioana, whom she finds “very fragile but very strong.” The 15-year-old daughter of a lawyer, Ioana went to the casting call in Bucharest with her friends, never expecting to be chosen a Supermodel finalist.

When Portmann asked to talk to her, Ioana said: “No, it’s my friend who wants to try.”

“Your friends don’t interest me,” Portmann replied. “It’s you that interests me.”

Portmann sent Ioana to the washroom to remove her makeup and then took a long look at her. She liked what she saw. “She’s a little big,” Portmann said later, “and we’ll have to put her on a diet. But I know she is someone who could become a top model.” Portmann urged the local journalists to take pictures of Ioana. “She’ll be a star, you’ll see,” Portmann said. But none of them saw any promise in the gawky youngster, a sentiment that Ioana herself shares.

“The problem with me,” Ioana says a few days before the Supermodel contest, “is I don’t have any confidence. I’m too tall. I just don’t look good. My hair isn’t right. My teeth are hanging down a bit. And I’m too inexperienced. I’m not the best-looking girl here.”

She speaks perfect English, which she learned in Washington, D.C., where her father worked for a year as a Romanian diplomat. Like most of the finalists in Romania, she also is a top student.

“When I was little,” she says, “I always watched models, but I thought it was a dream. I always figured I’d study law or international economics.” Still, she is overwhelmed by the prospect of becoming a professional model.

“I admire the profession, but I always looked at this world of models as something that couldn’t be touched by normal human beings like me. Now that I’m here, it seems closer.”

*

For two weeks in Bucharest, the finalists rehearse for the live telecast, eat light meals, cut back on their cigarettes and stay in a dormitory on the local college campus. One evening, a makeup artist and hairstylist are brought in and each girl poses, topless, with arms covering their breasts, for Emmanuelle Faucheux, a Paris photographer. It is, for Ioana, an epiphany.

“When I see those photos, I think, ‘Oh my God.’ I don’t recognize myself,” she says. They had the same effect on the photographer. “She comes alive in the photos,” Faucheux says. “She’s got something new, something special.”

Although 14 judges are invited to the Romanian contest from Ford-affiliated model agencies around Europe, they are just window dressing. Their job is to look over the more modest aspirants for assignments in European cities and the Far East. Everyone knows that Dominique Caffin, Katie Ford’s representative, will pick--and take--the winner.

Caffin started in the modeling business 15 years ago as a booking agent. Her career soared when she began scouting in Eastern Europe, and she was hired by Katie Ford to work from the Paris office. Last year, at Ford’s request, she moved to Miami. She scouts mostly in the United States now, but each year she makes one monthlong trip back to Eastern Europe.

“I’ve always hated to queue to find girls,” Caffin says. “I love this feeling of being in a village, talking to girls and telling them they have the potential.” In fact, her strength, and her weakness, is that she believes being a professional model is, for a lucky few, the best career in the world.

In Bucharest, the fifth stop on a seven-country journey, Caffin steps onto the casino theater stage, where the finalists are rehearsing with Romania’s most famous ballet star and choreographer, Ioan Tugearu. Each of the contestants, giggling nervously, knows that Caffin holds the key to fame and fortune in the West.

“I’m really impressed by you all,” Caffin says, smiling. “You’re so natural. So tall . And you all have such great legs.” Then she sets about dismantling the notion, prevalent in Eastern Europe countries, that the Supermodel contest is just another “Miss” contest, of which several dozen are held every year in Romania.

“To be a ‘Miss’ is great,” she says. “You get a present. But you are only a ‘Miss’ for one day or one year. In the modeling business, you can be a model until you are 40. This is a career. So don’t tell me you want to be a model for fun. Don’t tell me that. It’s hard. And you have to be strong.”

Then the shopping begins. Each girl takes a seat opposite Caffin at a table next to the roulette tables. Caffin is friendly, patient and interested. Alternating between French and English, she gently asks each girl to pull her hair back, exposing her face. Then, she has each one turn, first to one side and then the other, so that she can study her profile. She pauses occasionally to jot notes and then she takes a Polaroid photo. Each interview lasts less than five minutes.

“This is like a market, and I get to pick the flowers,” Caffin says between interviews. The secret to her craft, she says, is “to see two visions. One is what she is and the other is what she could become. I’m not God, you know. I can bring a girl to Paris or New York and no one likes her. But, for five minutes in her life, I’m the most important thing to her.”

The interviews continue. When 19-year-old Simona Haragha appears, Caffin takes a long look at her profile. Simona self-consciously touches her chin.

“You think you have a problem?” Caffin says.

“With my chin, my profile,” Simona says.

“A little,” Caffin replies, holding her smile. “The face is good. The profile a little less.”

As Simona walks away, Caffin looks concerned. “She is smart, that one,” she says. “She has everything. Gorgeous eyes. Great body. Long legs. It’s really too bad. Can you believe such a little detail can make such a difference? But maybe she will become one of the models who are known for something. The model with the chin.” She considers that a minute. “Let’s let her go that way. Either it works because she is someone who is really special or it doesn’t.”

Ioana Delcea, in person, is everything Caffin had hoped. Elegant. Intelligent. Beautiful. Wise beyond her 15 years.

“This girl Ioana has big power,” she says. “She knows what she wants. She plays a little baby, but she knows she’s beautiful.”

“She’s born for it,” Caffin says after the interview. “It’s amazing, really. She must be in Paris, to meet people and build her book. We will pay for the ticket.”

Her only worry is Ioana’s nose. Too big, Caffin decides, but not fatal. “If you see someone is going to be a star and there is a little something wrong, you can fix it before she becomes famous,” she says confidently.

Caffin gives no hint to the contestants, though. Ioana, like the others, has to wait for the contest to know her fate.

“Only God and luck can decide it,” Ioana said before her interview with Caffin. “I think this world of modeling is a world of tears and fears, and hope and joy, and a lot of suffering. I haven’t thought about the money. Maybe the fame, I don’t know. Just being on the stage and feeling that I look pretty. That’s a unique feeling. And when you do it from your heart, I hope, everyone can see that special light in your eyes.”

When the announcement comes, Ioana covers her mouth in surprise but recovers quickly, smiling and throwing two-handed kisses to the audience. Her prize is a trip to the Supermodel finals this fall in the United States, where Ford executives will choose the world winner. Ford figures Ioana will likely start her career in New York. Haragha, as runner-up, wins a trip to Paris, though Portmann says it may take several months to get her a French visa. It looks now, she says, as if six of the other contestants also will get jobs with agencies in smaller European markets.

Caffin leaves for Romania, bound for another crop of tall girls in Croatia, feeling good about her choice. Another discovery. Another young girl’s life changed forever.