CATHERINE

Catherine is a bit of wild child. Originally from a small town in South Georgia, she still has a soft southern edge to her voice, which creates the illusion that she is sweet and innocent -- though she's in fact a straight-talking girl who tells it like it is. She's more Jerry Hall than Holly Hunter, more hip chick than debutante.

Catherine says she needs constant stimulation and found small town life boring and oppressive. She is really close to her mother (who still lives in that small town in Georgia with Catherine's 18-year-old sister), and they talk every day on the phone. Catherine's mother visits New York every couple of months to hang out for a few days and shop.

By the time Catherine was 18 years old, she had lived independently in Paris for two years, having obsessed about the city as a teenager: "It always looked so cool and glamorous in films." At 15 she escaped there to get away from a relationship with an older man. Initially she got herself onto an exchange program in the north of France, but she hated it: "Everyone was really mean and they locked us in at 6pm at night! I called my mom and said I'm breaking out and going to Paris. She gave me two weeks to fall flat on my face before coming to rescue me -- but I went to Paris and got a flat and bullshitted my way into a job."

She also met a young Parisian and fell in love. She said he was very French -- flamboyant and romantic. He told her a tale of how his wife had died in a tragic scuba diving accident in the Pacific -- which Catherine later discovered was a lie. "I don't hold it against him -- I just think he wanted to be James Bond!" She said he was absolutely gorgeous, and when her mom came to visit she loved him too. "I'm normally really perceptive about people, but with him there was just no frame of reference," Catherine says. By the age of 19 Catherine was engaged to the Frenchman, but she ultimately didn't go through with the nuptials. While sitting on the plane waiting to take off for a tropical wedding location in Jamaica, Catherine all of a sudden bolted from the 747 and out of that relationship. "It was a rather dramatic way to get out of the engagement."