No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (18 page)

I called Mike. “I’ve thought about it,” I said. “You’re right. We’re a great couple. We should be living together.”

He came over and helped me get my things and that was that.

I worked and worked. I began making oodles of money. I was hot and knew it and it went to my head. Photographers started learning to send limos for me. The other girls took the subway, but not Janice.

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

I’d go home after a hard day’s work and there’d be flowers waiting for me.
Thank you, Janice. You were wonderful, Janice. You are beautiful, Janice.
I would get a call from the office at night to make sure I was safe in bed, and a wake-up call in the morning to see me on my way.

I loved the way the photo studios smelled. They were usually cold and damp, with a hint of chemicals in the air.

Coffee, too. Fresh-brewed,

and tons of it. And doughnuts.

You

could

always

tell the bulimic models:

They’re the ones who ate

the doughnuts.

I was starting to take

an increasingly aggressive

interest in my

career. Starting with the

pictures. The agency was

always

sending new

shots of us to its clients.

Most models didn’t

get involved: Sifting

through all those pho

CH.

tographs

was hard

OUGH LITTLE BIT

BEING A T

work, so they let the

agency handle it.

But I was very picky about

what got sent out. I had opinions. I wanted more

control, and I got it. I had a good eye for the way pictures worked. I knew more about photography than they suspected—more than
I
suspected—and what I didn’t know I was determined to learn.

Willie took me to lunch or dinner two or three times a week. She’d fawn over me. She’d invite clients along, and N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 129

sometimes they brought their wives. They all fawned. One woman asked if I’d be good enough to autograph a menu for her teenage daughter. “She’s in awe of you,” she said. I took the pen and scrawled my name across the menu and thought,
You bet she’s in awe of me. She should be. I’m
fucking great.

Funny what success will do to a girl, particularly a girl with a split personality. The insecure, hyperanxious, self-loathing Janice was nowhere in sight.

The money started pouring in. Editorial was nothing: seventy-five dollars a day. I doubled it. They offered me twelve hundred for a lingerie shoot: I asked for two thousand and got it. I became the guinea pig. “If we can get twenty-five hundred for Janice, we’ll try to get it for Iman.”

I could hear the bookers in the office. “No, sorry. Janice isn’t available.” “Janice? You can’t afford Janice.” “I’ll talk to her, but, you know—Janice is picky.”

I weighed myself twice a day, every day. I was five nine and a half and 134 pounds when I’d first come to New York. I was still five nine and a half, as far as I could tell, but now I kept my weight at an even 125. And I had to work at it, people. You could find me jogging around the Central Park reservoir five mornings a week. Riding my bike Sunday mornings, when the park was closed to traffic.

Practicing yoga with Zen Master Mike.

I was in total control for the first time in my life. I was
driving
this rig. And I felt
good
about it. I could look at myself in the mirror—my surface self—and see beauty there. Beauty and power. I would think,
Fuck you, Ray,
you rat bastard. Never amount to anything? Look at me
now.

They wanted me for a shoot with Luciano Pavarotti. I said, “Fine, but if you’re going to put his name in the piece, I want my name in there, too.” I wasn’t about to hide in the 130 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

background. I became my own publicist. And it worked.

There it was.
Luciano Pavarotti and Janice Dickinson Paint
the Town Red. Janice Dickinson and the New York Mets
Do Manhattan.

The thing is, I made it
fun.
I would do anything. I was game. I remember flying to Tobago for Sir Norman Parkinson,
the
preeminent British fashion photographer for damn near fifty years. “Janice,” he said in that tweedy upper-crust voice. “Would you very much mind scaling the side of a mountain in a thong?”

“No problem, Normy,” I said, and I scaled away.

“You know what I like about you, Janice?” he said later, as we wrapped up for the day.

“Slay me.”

“You do the work. You’re not a diva like most of the girls. And you make me laugh.”

There was no stopping me. One day I showed up to

audition for a JVC Handycam campaign. It was a major gig, and I wanted it. I walked into a conference room and found myself alone with six Japanese executives. They were all dressed exactly alike, each with his hands clasped in front of him. They all just sat and stared, not even moving: If you told me they were breathing, I would have asked for proof. No warm hellos, no niceties, a big zero.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “The search is over.”

Still nothing.

“I am the new face of JVC.”

Still nothing. The fucking guys looked like statues. But I wasn’t going to let them get to me. No. I wasn’t going to let them see Janice the Terrified, Janice the Loser Who Will Never Amount to Anything. Hell no. Today, I was Janice the Magnificent, Janice Who Could Do No Wrong.
Prepare
to be dazzled, motherfuckers!

“You see these almond-shaped eyes?” I asked. I

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 131

walked across the room, slowly, dramatically. Their heads moved in unison, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. “These are the eyes of my Japanese great-greatgrandmother.”

Jesus! Where was I getting this bullshit?

“That’s right, gentlemen. My great-great-grandmother was Japanese. And in a moment of weakness, admittedly, she had the poor taste to sleep with an Irishman. That Irishman was my great-great-grandfather. And I’m not saying he was a nice guy. He wasn’t. But my great-greatgrandmother was a fine woman, a fine
Japanese
woman, and if you think about that, gentlemen, I don’t know why you would even consider another model.”

I left without another word. What a fucking performance!

I got back to the agency and was told that Willie wanted to see me right away. I walked in and batted my way through the cigarette smoke.

“What’s up?” I said.

“The JVC guys called. They want you.”

My heart was beating a mile a minute, but I acted very cool. “I want twenty thousand a day,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Willie,” I said. “The business is changing. Can’t you see it? These guys have money. I want to make the jump to the next level. You have to be more aggressive.”

“You’ll aggress yourself right out of a job,” she said.

“Are you going to ask for the twenty thousand or not?”

“I’m going to ask for five thousand, and you’ll be happy to get it.”

I laughed and turned and walked toward the door.

“Janice!”

I kept going. I walked right out of the agency and across the street to Eileen Ford’s to see Monique Pillard, now the

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

head booker. Monique had believed in me from the start, from the first time she set eyes on me, that afternoon when Eileen dismissed me as
too ethnic.
And she
still
believed in me. I told her about the JVC guys: I knew I had them, I said. And then I took another chance: I told her I wanted to speak to Jerry, Eileen’s husband, not Eileen. This was highly unusual, to say the least, a real slap in the face to Eileen—as Monique understood only too well.

“Eileen is sensitive, you know,” she said. “Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sensitive, too,” I said.

She nodded and headed for the inner sanctum. A few

minutes later she returned to lead me down the corridor.

We went into Eileen’s office, Monique and me and my big fucking lips.

Eileen and Jerry stood up. She was so nicely put

together. She had a big smile for me. But she knew I remembered; I could see it in her face.

“Hello, Janice,” Jerry said. “Nice to meet you.”

“So nice to see you again, Janice,” Eileen cooed.

“Here’s the deal,” I said, plunging

right in. I told them about the JVC

campaign, just as I’d told Wilhelmina and Monique. And I told them I wanted twenty

thousand a day.

“Janice, really—” Eileen

began.

But Jerry cut her off.

“You’ll get it,” he said.

MONIQUE PILLARD—

AN INCREDIBLE FRIEND.

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 133

“Good,” I said. “I get my twenty grand, you get me.”

Jerry said he’d negotiate the deal himself. We left Eileen’s office together. Jerry made the call, and I got my twenty grand. I called Willie and told her to send my books over to Ford. “I got what I asked for,” I said, and hung up.

Okay, so I wanted to rub it in. Sue me. It felt great.

THE GOOD

DAUGHTER

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

Once a week, Sunday afternoons, regular as clockwork, I called home to speak to my mother. I don’t know why I bothered—she’d never been much of a mother—but I guess part of me felt bad for her. Her life seemed so empty and horrible. She’d never seen Paris or Milan, and never would, and she’d never get out of that backwater because she was never going to find the courage to free herself from the rat bastard.

I was always anxious before I called, but a little wine or champagne did the trick. It was like magic.
Boom!
I’m okay now. And I’d pick up the phone and dial.

“Oh, honey, another magazine cover! I clipped it out and framed it. You are just such a star!”

“How are you, Mom?”

“I am great, thank the Good Lord.” The sound of her voice was enough to make me cringe. “I am just so happy to be alive, and to have a wonderful little girl like you, and oh, yes, I forgot to thank you for that beautiful silk blouse you sent me last week! I wore it to church this morning. I got so many nice comments on it!”

She was into God now, easing herself off the drugs and into a nice anesthetic church buzz. Debbie told me about the little pictures of the Virgin Mary, hanging all over the N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 135

house, and how Mother never went anywhere without her blessed rosary.

“Glad you liked the shirt, Mom.”

“Have you talked to your sister?”

I told her Debbie was doing fine. She and Edward had broken up and she’d moved to the Upper East Side and was booking jobs left and right.

“And how’s our darling Alexis?”

Alexis was living in Pennsylvania, staining glass and making jewelry and hanging out with an older man who treated her less than nicely. I resented the way Mother always called her “our Alexis,” as if somehow we shared the blame for what the rat bastard had done to her.

“She’s fine, Mom.”

By this time, I was starting to get pissed. I
always
got pissed. I tried to be civil, but I couldn’t seem to get beyond my anger. She had never protected Alexis. She had never been a mother. She was too busy shutting herself down.

“The weather has been terrible here . . . a new administrator at the hospital . . . could use a nice pair of comfortable shoes . . . the mechanic says it’s the crankshaft, whatever that is . . . ” I would let her drone on, not really listening, getting angrier, guzzling my wine to take the edge off. I was usually pretty buzzed by the time I had eased her off the phone. And I usually kept going until Mike returned from his Sunday power ride around Central Park.

“Are you drunk?” he’d say, all pissy. “Don’t you know drinking is bad for you? You’re not getting enough exercise.

The body is a temple, and you’re treating yours like shit.”

So, yeah—things weren’t perfect. In due course, I discovered that Mike was not merely opinionated, but fucking tyrannical. I was allowed to have opinions of my own, yes, but I was urged to keep them to myself. Whenever I