No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (11 page)

The night before the wedding, both families went out to dinner. My father was trying hard not to be impressed by all that wealth and power. His little girl, the piece of trash who’d never amount to anything, had clearly hooked a man who thought otherwise.

At the restaurant, as we were waiting for our table, Ron’s mother took my father aside. I could see them at the far end of the bar. She was doing all the talking. She was smiling, but I could read don’t-fuck-with-me in the creases on her face. My father—well, he looked terrified. All the color had drained out of his cheeks. When they were done,

72 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Ron’s mother rejoined us. “I love your daughter,” she told my mother. “My son is a very lucky man.”

My father recovered and joined us at the bar, and a few moments later the maître d’ led us to our table. We had a lovely evening: The rat bastard didn’t say a word all night.

He just nodded his head like a bad little boy who’d received the scolding of his life. And every time I glanced in his direction, he quickly turned away—as if he were afraid of me or something.

After dinner, my parents went back to the motel. The rest of us returned to Brookline. When we got back to the house, I took Jeanne aside. I was dying of curiosity.

“What did you say to my father?” I asked her.

“I told him I knew everything,” she said. “And I told him if he said even one wrong word, that if he even
looked
SELF-PORTRAIT FIRST THING IN THE MORNING BEFORE COFFEE.

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 73

at you funny, I would make it my mission to destroy his fucking life.” I had never heard Jeanne curse before.

“Excuse my French,” she said.

I hugged her. I felt so hopeful. I had married a wonderful man from a wonderful family. I was barely twenty years old and my Real Life was taking off in all sorts of new and exciting directions.

Ron and I got back to New York and resumed life as a married couple. We joked that our sex life would probably crash to a stop now that we were man and wife, but it didn’t. It slowed down some, but that was because of the drugs.

To be honest, though, I was getting concerned. A little toot now and then was okay, but I worried about us.

I was still calling Willie every day, pushing the agency for work—any kind of work. But things were slow. And that worried me, too. I have never been, and will never be, the kind of woman who’s taken care of, the Edna Gralnicks of the world notwithstanding. I wanted to pay my own damn way. And, hell, it’s not like we were loaded. Ron made a decent living on the road, but we had expensive tastes: Courvoisier. Three-star restaurants. Cocaine. Funny how you forget about the rent . . .

I sat down with Wilhelmina a week later and told her I desperately needed money; our landlord was no longer our friend. Willie said she had something for me. She knew it wasn’t going to make me happy, but the money would be fast and tax-free.

That night I was waiting tables at a smoky little bar on 37th and Madison, which attracted a clientele of rich middle-aged men with a penchant for hookers. The owner was a guy named Mark Fleischman, whom I’d get to know 74 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

better later, when he became co-owner of Studio 54—

though he tried very hard to get to know me better right then and there.

Some of the hookers were fine-looking girls. A couple of them seemed oddly familiar. Hadn’t we crossed paths on go-sees here and there? Suddenly, I was terrified. I would
never
fall that low. Willie knew that. Right? I mean, even if I weren’t married, even if I’d been junkie-desperate, she knew I’d never sell my body.
Right?

I brushed that crazy thought aside. I was being paranoid. She was just helping me out. After all, I had Ron. I was loved. I was
loved.

So I buckled down and worked hard and hated every

fucking minute of it. But a few nights into it, guess what?

The rent was paid.

So here it is, weeks later. We’re okay with the landlord, and Ron’s getting ready for a little gig in Tarrytown, New York.

He should be happy, but he’s not. This is the first time I’ve seen him go off to work unhappy, and it bothers me deeply.

We get into an argument about drug use. He shouts, and waves his arms, and tells me I’m crazy. I apologize. He apologizes. We hug, and off he goes to hook up with the guys, and I tell him I’ll take a bus after work and be there for the last set.

I go to my hooker bar and lay on the short-skirt charm, like I learned to do at the Orange Bowl. I cut out early with two hundred bucks in tips, and make it to Port Authority just as the Tarrytown bus is getting ready to pull out. I haven’t had time to change. I
know
I look like a hooker.

Some guy propositions me on the bus and you can hear the slap all the way back to Manhattan.

I sleep, comfortably, for the rest of the trip.

* * *

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 75

Now I’m in Tarrytown. Get to the concert hall. Go through the rear entrance, don’t hear anything, and assume I’m late.

I run into B.B. He gives me a quick hug and tells me they’re just taking a break; last set hasn’t even started.

I go look for Ron. Walk into the dressing room.

I find Ron. Ron who loves me so much he cries whenever he has to leave town. Ron who tells me over and over,

“Girl, you are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Ron who has never felt like this about anybody, ever, and never will and never wants to.

I find Ron with another woman, pumping away with all the force and splendor of a man possessed.

“NOOOO!” I scream.

Ron’s head whips round so fast he falls off the couch.

The woman just lays there spread-eagled, staring at me.

She doesn’t even have the courtesy to cross her fucking legs. I turn to go.

“Honey baby—”

But I’m already out the door. Ron follows, stumbling over his pants and struggling to pull them up. He catches up with me by the stairs and I whip round and slug him and he stumbles against the wall.

“You
sonofabitch
!”

“Honey—”

But I’m not there anymore. I’m blind with rage. He

comes at me again and I kick him and he falls backward down the stairs. He lands with a heavy thud.

I run outside and hurry through the parking lot and run run run, blinded by tears.

That’s a husband’s love for you.

Cars go by. Men hoot and holler. It’s a miracle I’m not raped and left to die in a Dumpster. I certainly look the part.

Miles later, numb, lost, I find myself at a gas station 76 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

near a freeway off-ramp. There’s a heavyset truck driver getting ready to hop aboard and pull out. He’s looking at me more with lust than sympathy. I open my mouth to talk, but no words come. I’m having an anxiety attack. I lean against the side of the truck, trying to draw breath. He doesn’t know what to do. He pats me on the back—
pat pat
pat
—and the tears come. Those fucking buckets of tears again.

“You okay, miss?” the trucker asks me. He seems like a decent guy. I shake my head from side to side.
No, I am not
okay. Do I look like I’m goddamn okay?

He gives me a ride to Manhattan. I don’t say much. I listen. He tells me he’s married. He has a boy, seven. He and the wife had trouble getting pregnant, which is why he looks like he could be the boy’s grandfather. I take my cue and tell him he doesn’t look like a grandfather. He loves his boy, he says. He says that until he had his boy, he didn’t really understand what it meant to truly love someone. But now he understands.

Weird. This guy just does not look like the New Sensitive Man type. I mean, if you were going to cast him in a movie, he’d be the truck driver with a weakness for doughnuts and bondage porn, maybe even in that order.

We get to Manhattan. I thank him. We shake hands. He tells me—I kid you not—that he knows good things are in store for me. Maybe even in the next day or two. He has this
feeling,
see. His mother was a Hungarian gypsy, a psychic, and he seems to have inherited a little of the old knack; that’s what his friends tell him, anyway. I give him a kiss on the cheek and tell him I hope he’s right and get out of the truck.

I walk up the street. It’s three in the morning. I still look like a hooker, a miserable fucking hooker.

I remember that I have two hundred dollars in tips in my N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 77

purse and hail a cab and make my way to my friend Alexandra King’s apartment, on 72nd Street near Madison. The cabdriver asks me how business is. I tell him to fuck off.

Alexandra is home. Yes! I go inside and collapse on the couch and and tell her everything. She’s my buddy. My bosom bitch. A fellow model. Gorgeous. Her fucking parrot wakes up and starts squawking the one phrase it knows:

“Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me.” No, fuck
me.

“Love sucks,” Alexandra says.

“Yes,” I say. “But what else is there?”

“Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me,” the parrot says.

We look at each other and laugh. Yeah, there’s that.

I got back to 14th Street late the next morning to find Ron passed out on the floor. He had a bed and a couch to choose from, but he took the floor. His mouth was open.

He was snoring. Someone had bandaged his thumb.

“Wake up, you fuck,” I shouted.

He didn’t move. I kicked him. He opened his eyes and looked up at me like he was in a coma.

“Hey.” That’s what he said.
Hey.
No apology. Nothing.

“I hate you,” I told him.

I locked myself in the bedroom and popped a couple of sleeping pills and went bye-bye. As I drifted off, I began to wonder who the fuck I’d married, and—more to the

point—
why.
He’d wanted me, right? Really, truly wanted me. And to be wanted like that—well, it can go to a young girl’s head. Or maybe—God help me—maybe it was the

orgasm. An orgasm can make a believer out of any girl, especially a
first
orgasm.

“Fuck me fuck me fuck me,” I moaned, burying my face in the pillow. I felt about as intelligent as Alexandra’s foulmouthed parrot.

When I woke up, it was early evening. Ron was gone.

78 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

There was a note taped to the fridge. Shows how little he knew me: I never went
near
the fridge. He was off to Atlantic City for a week; the band had a gig.
Call you in a
day or two.
Not a fucking word about what happened. Not even a
hint
of an apology.

I spent the next few days eating junk and watching TV.

Sometimes, just to get my heart started, I’d add a shot of Courvoisier to my morning coffee.

I began to understand the appeal of television.
Brady
Bunch
reruns.
Kojak,
with that old lollipop-sucking perv Telly Savalas.
All in the Family. Baretta.
(Robert Blake!

Jesus, even back then, any fool could see the guy wasn’t all there.)
Barney Miller. Happy Days. Mary Tyler Moore.

Rhoda.

Pretty soon I was talking back to the TV. “Hi, Rhoda.

Love that dress.” Who needed a life? Who needed a family? By the third day I thought I’d never seen anyone as handsome as the fucking Fonz.

Then the phone rang. I couldn’t believe it. Three days had gone by and this was the first time my phone had rung. I was really popular. My own fucking husband wouldn’t even call me. I was in such shock that by the time I picked up the receiver the person at the other end was gone. I put the receiver back in its cradle. I willed it to ring again. It did.

“Hello?”

“Janice?” It was one of the assistants at Wilhelmina.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Don’t forget. Those two guys from Christa are coming in this afternoon.”

Shit! It was next week already!

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying not to panic. “I’ll be there.”

I hung up. Oh my God! The Silverstein brothers, from Willie’s sister agency in Paris. They were looking for hot new faces. They needed girls in Paris.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 79

I ran into the bathroom and saw
my
face and freaked. I mean, it was like a cartoon.
Yaaaaaaargh
! I looked like a hooker after a high-profit holiday weekend. I mean, tired as hell and totally
fucked.
Then I thought,
No. This is not possible. That isn’t my face staring back at me.
I shut my eyes real tight and said a little prayer, and when I opened them again I was still there.

I was hosed. I had an hour to pull myself together. One lousy hour.

No problem. I’d been bullshitting myself into action my whole life:

“I am Janice Dickinson, motherfucker! I am unstoppable. I’ll show them. I’ll fucking show all of you!”

“Shut the fuck up!” It was the asshole in the apartment across the alley. Scared the shit out of me. “People are trying to sleep around here!”

Two hours later I arrived at Wilhelmina for the cattle call. The place was crowded with desperate girls. You could smell the flop sweat.