Daily News from New York, New York • 248

t) castles in the air continued from page 13 It 13 i.f t-2 i borhood dogs raced in and snatched the props, the fried chicken, off the kitchen table. "It's bizarre," she said. "Who'd have thought it would be a way to make a living?" Her clients usually want more exotic settings than a simple kitchen Roman gardens, for an instance. Monica not only found the Roman gardens at Mill Neck Manor, but also put on white chiffon and did the goddess bit for that Calgon commercial with the flaming urn. For those who saw Calgon's TV message in black and white, it ought to be noted that Monica's flowing tresses are a rich chestnut.

Not quite 5 feet 8 and not yet 30, she has the classic features and regal carriage that unmistakably mark her for what she used to be, a successful high-fashion model. Having been a model, with a wide acquaintance among photographers, helped Monica create a business that is, you might say, out of sites. And she is glad of that, but she looks back on modeling with no regrets at all. "It was exciting at first, she confessed. "I got to go to Europe and I liked that, but then I got bored.

"It wasn't that I had any trouble. Everybody helped me from the beginning. Then I've always been skinny and I had no structural problems. I was just bored. Monica put aside her hatbox, that badge of the photographer's model, five years ago, and fled straight away to Long Island and her castles.

Not only bored, she said, but also "so neurotic that it took me two years to settle down, Monica found surcease in prowling the weed-grown acres and echoing rooms of all-but-abandoned estates. "I'm a natural born trespasser," she explained. She still regrets the passing of Ferguson's Castle in Huntington Harbor, pulled down last year, and dreads the doom of Garvan Castle in Old Westbury, unused since 1931 but still furnished and scheduled for demolition this spring. "It's utterly senseless," she said of the loss of the great places. "The country is letting so much of its priceless heritage rot away here.

It is really criminal. The castles are crumbling and being bulldozed away and, worse than that, being vandalized, their windows stoned out, paneling ripped off, precious art objects carried away." The baronies which survive generally wear a rundown air, rather like a czarist duke reduced to waiting on tables. The F. W. Woolworth house lives on in Glen Cove as a modeling school and Otto Kahn's chateau in Cold Spring Hills as Eastern Military Academy.

Old Westbury Gardens, the Vanderbilt Mansion in Centerport and Harry F. Guggenheim's 90-acre Falaise are parks. Soaring taxes and servant salaries bring the roar of the developer's bulldozer ever nearer those estates that remain in private hands. Monica thinks she is helping them make it by sharing her fees with their owners. Her Locations, lists 136 great houses, 36 of them with more than 40 rooms.

The fee for shooting a print ad in one of them runs between $350 and $4,500, for a TV commercial Things can go wrong on a location and so Monica, after lining up the site, does not con- PHOTO BY ALLEN 0. HAAS Monica worries about the fate of such glories as the ornate fireplace in ballroom of the former Woolworth estate. .7 3 also learned not to pay a fee until the film is in the can," she said. By being on the spot, as with the Calgon commercial, Monica can sometimes pick up another fee by appearing before the camera. When she arranged for Cannon Films to use Fritz House in Oyster Bay, Monica was drafted as an extra in an X-rated horror picture called "Silent Night, Bloody Night," which will be released soon.

"And I've been promised an extra's part in "The Great Gatsby," she said. "I never thought this thing would last as long as it has," Monica went on, wonderingly. "You know, today the idea is naturalness. I'd never make it as a model now. We were unnatural Barbie Dolls teased hair was grotesque.

sider her part of the fee earned unless she goes along for the shooting. "The crews are very sweet," she explained, "and they try very hard to be careful but For a Tang television spot Monica arranged for a big white Georgian house with a pier on the Sound and a 90-foot yacht as welL "It was to go like this," she said: "The lady of the great house is in front of the house talking to her butler in the background and yacht is seen sailing away in the sunset. "The crew had been there from 2 to 5 p. m. and still hadn't shot a foot of film.

That's standard, and anyway it wasn't sunset yet. The yachtsman called out through his bullhorn that if they didn't start shooting right away he was going. And he started to sail away." Monica pulled off her dress and tried to swim after the boat in basic nylon. "I've learned how to swim since then," she said. The yacht stopped, pulled her aboard and yielded to her passionate plea to remain for the finish of the shooting.

She not only has learned how to swim. "I Today it's the girl-next-door-look and that's good. "So I expected to be out of business by now, but photographers are still posing models front of mansions." And Monica Randall, thi IS girl who dreamed about castles, knows whei the mansions are. PAGE 16 NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS MAY 13. 193.