"Beauty is a commodity that is used and then thrown away when something better comes along," declares lovely Jeanne Rejaunier, who lived through ten years of oncamera commercials before quitting to write The Beauty Trap. Broadly based on her modeling experiences, Jeanne's novel both reflects and denounces what she calls "the American dream--a culture which places a premium on beauty, success and status, and which lives by the images Madison Avenue dictates." Jeanne, who refuses to be caught in the trap, has never relied solely on her looks: She mastered three languages as a child, studied piano, violin and voice, and won her share of ribbons in equitation. A Vassar graduate, she also attended the Sorbonne, the University of Pisa and Rome's Goetheschule. After leaving the modeling scene, Jeanne moved to Hollywood, landed several movie and television roles and enrolled in a creative-writing workshop at UCLA. Now working on four more books, she has been asked to star in the film version of The Beauty Trap, but says, "I haven't made a decision. Anything that takes me away from writing has to be carefully weighed." Her little leisure time is spent with two calico cats, Tabby and Kimmy, and riding her horse, Red Pepper. Regarding the bridal path, she feels that "the conventional type of marriage, for the sake of society, is not for me. All too often, women forfeit their individualism. I won't do that." Whatever her future holds is certain to be founded on more than pulchritude. As Jeanne put it when she posed for us among some auto wrecks, "Beauty be-comes tacky if there's nothing behind it but junk, and ends up--like all material things--in the junk yard." Predictably, there's no such fate in store for this beauty.
