Julia prefers to talk about Peggy Frederic's, which catered to the doctors' and lawyers' wives of Conway. ''It was a beautiful, beautiful shop,'' she says. Julia and her sister, Jolene, worked there and loved poring over the fashion magazines from New York. ''I mean, nobody in Arkansas would get Women's Wear Daily,'' Julia says, ''and I would be reading it.''

In 1980, when she was 17, her mother took her on a buying trip to New York. To Julia, it was Oz. ''I fell in love and wanted to stay and not go back,'' she says. She attended the University of Central Arkansas but managed to return to New York to model for the couture designer Tracy Mills, who came from Pine Bluff. In 1984, right after her graduation, Julia was again in New York, in the Tracy Mills showroom, when she called Adolfo in search of work. She got an interview, and knew enough to wear one of the designer's white summer dresses when she went to see him. ''She had bought it at Saks or something,'' Adolfo remembers. ''She looked so nice.'' He hired her on the spot.

For the next nine years, Julia worked out of Adolfo's Upper East Side salon, ''a mini Versailles,'' as she calls it, selling the designer's Chanel-inspired suits and tending to Nancy Reagan's set -- Betsy Bloomingdale, Leonore Annenberg, Harriet Deutsch. ''She would go and sit with a lady who might be a little bit impatient,'' Adolfo says. ''She would have the art to calm her down.'' Betsy Bloomingdale, for one, remembers Julia well. ''She was a darling girl,'' she says. ''Adolfo adored her.'' The designer took Julia to Dallas, Beverly Hills and the White House, for fittings in Nancy Reagan's dressing room. ''She would dress her, and then I would come to see how she looked,'' Adolfo remembers. Julia, who helped prepare the cards listing appropriate accessories that hung with each of Nancy Reagan's Adolfo dresses and suits, traveled with a young, rich East Side crowd. Her friends included Andrew Schiff, a doctor at New York Hospital now married to Karenna Gore, a daughter of the Vice President. She also befriended John Theodoracopulos, nephew of the society gossip columnist Taki.

In January 1991, friends arranged for Julia to go on a blind date with David Koch, a peripatetic bachelor with a laugh like a car starting up on a cold morning. David Koch was the executive vice president of Koch Industries and the 1980 Libertarian candidate for Vice President. For years he had been involved (and still is) in a venomous family feud with his brother Charles, chairman of Koch, against his two other brothers, William and Frederick, over money and shares. David, who was well known in Julia's circles for his parties, took her to Le Club, an East Side place of the moment, where they did not hit it off. ''Afterward we shook hands and I said, 'I'm glad I met that man because now I know I never want to go out with him,''' Julia recalls, smiling.

Six months later, when the two ran into each other at a party, David introduced himself to Julia as if for the first time, to her disgust. ''She said, 'David, we went out together,''' he recalls. ''And I pulled out my trusty black book and said, 'Oh, my God.''' David Koch, who seems as unstudied as his wife is guarded, made amends by taking Julia to the U.S. Open. It was the beginning of a five-year courtship that friends say was not always easy for Julia, particularly at David's lavish parties, which attracted the kind of women that men don't often bring home to mother. ''It was a little embarrassing for her,'' says David Patrick Columbia. ''But he liked that Hugh Hefner-esque decoration, and Julia was very patient with that.''

Julia was equally patient, at first, with the 1970's decor of his U.N. Plaza apartment, but by 1995, at her urging, the couple was looking at Jackie Onassis' apartment. He not only overbid the asking price, but also the $8-million-plus offered by Terry Semel of Warner Brothers. ''It needed a lot of work,'' David Koch says. ''It kind of reminded me of my mother's home.''

That summer, David had surgery for localized prostate cancer. Julia stuck by him, but few of his friends ever expected him to marry. Julia, however, prevailed. ''After four and a half years, Julia gave me two choices,'' he says. ''I would be a live husband or a dead bachelor.''