No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (25 page)

Guys making out with guys. People fucking in the bathrooms. Drug-addled girls bent over the bar snorting while some sleazoid took them from behind. Sex sex sex. And somehow, since the common denominator was sex, all

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 183

these crazy groups—the druggies, the fags, the black-leather set—managed to coexist quite nicely, thank you very much.

It’s strange. Decadent as it seems now, I look back on it and think there was a certain honesty to the scene. It’s like people were saying,
Yeah, we’re animals. We fuck. You
can put us in nice clothes and take us out to watch Shakespeare in the Park but we’re still animals deep down, and
we like fucking best of all. It’s all about fucking. Life is
about fucking. Shakespeare is about fucking. Beethoven is
about fucking. Name one thing that isn’t about fucking.

And they were all there (though, admittedly, not all of them were fucking). All the people from
People,
glossy pages come to life. Smiling and cooing at each other.
Look
at us. Aren’t we special? Aren’t we interesting?

One night I was there with this mildly interesting conga player who didn’t understand why I refused to go to bed with him. “Well, you know, we’ve had dinner all of two times,” I said. “I’m an old-fashioned girl. I believe in courtship.” He didn’t like that, and I got tired of listening to him whine, so I excused myself to use the bathroom. A girl was going down on another girl in the stall next to mine—
yawn
—and I did my business and left and bumped into Warhol. “Janice,” he said in that sweet voice. “Come over here and fill me up. I’ve been feeling so empty all day.” He always had his camera around his neck. He took it off and held it up and snapped another in a series of self-portraits,
Andy and Janice at Studio, # 317.
Some geeky guy was watching us. He was looking at me like he wanted to fuck me, again, since clearly he’d already fucked me—

in his head—and come. Andy took me by the elbow and hustled me off. “How did
he
get in?” he wondered. “Who’s manning the barricades?” There was another guy wearing leather chaps and nothing else. He looked like something

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

out of
Midnight Cowboy,
something that hadn’t made the final cut. Andy whinnied in my ear and led me to a quiet corner and sat me down.

“So?” he said. “Talk.” Andy had many gifts, among

them the ability to really listen. He’d ask you a question and look at you with this sort of gentle intensity, genuinely wanting to hear your answer. He was curious about a spread he’d seen in an Italian men’s magazine. “You looked like you were about to blow the camera,” he said.

“Those lips must reduce grown men to tears.”

“Thank you—I think.”

Then Iman came over and asked me to take her to

Rubell’s office, so I kissed Andy good-bye and off we went. I saw the conga player, scanning the crowd, looking for me, and I yanked Iman into a corridor until the coast was clear.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“He doesn’t think I’m putting out fast enough,” I said.

Rubell greeted us like royalty. There was no incense or myrrh, but there was plenty of nose candy.

Calvin Klein showed up. I thought he’d be mad at me, given our recent blowup at his runway show, but he was very friendly. No, that’s not right; this went well beyond friendly.

He kept telling me how hot I looked.
Fabulous. Yummy.

And I
did
look hot. I was wearing a beautiful Sonya Rykiel cashmere dress, with pearls, and my hair was fucking perfect. Just thinking about it now makes me hot. Excuse me for a moment . . .

So where was I? Oh, right—in Rubell’s office, with

Calvin and Iman. And Calvin invites us back to his place.

And we score a cab on 54th and get dropped at his Upper East Side apartment. And up we go. And Calvin makes us drinks and he keeps ogling me and saying, “You look hot, Janice. No,
seriously.
Really hot. I mean,
hot.
”

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 185

And Iman says, “I think she gets it, Calvin.”

And Calvin leaves the room and comes back a few

moments later, having slipped out of his pants, to get comfortable. So now he’s sitting there in a boxy silk shirt and no pants and Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear and fucking knee socks. It was bizarre. Maybe he thought
he
looked hot. So I told him, “You look really hot, Calvin. I mean,
hot.
I
love
the socks.” But he didn’t catch the irony. Then I said, “Why don’t you do a line of underwear? Just put your name on it. I bet it’ll sell.” And his eyes lit up, but he didn’t say anything. He should have said, “Janice, you’re a genius. I’ll cut you in for ten percent.” But he didn’t.

And then Iman changed the subject, saying, “That Studio. Those boys are really raking it in, huh?”

It sure looked that way. And I guess the Internal Revenue Service was curious, too. They’d probably heard about the garbage bags full of cash that left the club every night. I wondered if they knew that Rubell liked dumping the cash on his bed and getting naked with young boys and
coming into money,
as it were.

CALVIN KLEIN, IMAN, AND BARRY SCHWARTZ

DURING THE STUDIO 54 DAYS.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

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

In December 1978, the Organized Crime Strike Force

raided the club. It was big news. The U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed that Rubell and Schrager had two sets of books, one of which they cooked to avoid taxes. Apparently, along with the two sets of books, they found other books with lists of names—the
People
people, and next to each name a little notation about the drugs they liked and the kind of sex they enjoyed. Hey, it was a full-service club. Gotta keep the clients happy.

There was a big party for Rubell and Schrager before they were sentenced. Halston was in charge. Everyone was there. Bianca, Warhol, Liza Minnelli. Richard Gere. Janice Dickinson . . .

Diana Ross sang for the guests. I envied her, up there on the stage, bathed in light, looking like an angel . . .

But the truth is, it was all very sad. The party was over.

It felt like a funeral. Studio 54 had been a place to run to when you were lonely. Just getting through the front door made you feel special, anointed. And once you were inside, you were with family. You felt accepted, validated,
loved.

So what if it wasn’t real? It felt real. And we all need our illusions.

For a while, to fill the gap left by Studio’s disappearance, people concentrated on dinner parties. Diane von Furstenburg gave great dinner parties. Then it was skating parties.

Everyone would meet at the roller rink and get stoned on mushrooms and go happily crazy. I kept running into Charlie Haughk at these things; you couldn’t miss the Hawaiian shirts. One night after work he took me to John’s Pizza, on Bleecker Street. Best pizza in New York. We ran into his father, Charles Sr. He was wearing a shoulder holster. I was a little taken aback, admittedly: Charlie never mentioned that his old man was a detective with the NYPD. And, shit!

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 187

I had a gram of coke in my purse. I kept thinking he was waiting for me to finish my pizza before throwing me against the wall and busting me. He didn’t, of course. He was a very sweet guy. Told me he was a big fan. Told me
Charlie
was a big fan. It was odd. I almost felt he wanted to see us together, me and Junior, out in Bayside, maybe, dodging rugrats behind a white picket fence.

Meanwhile, the work kept coming. But not at home. I went to Mexico City for Mexican
Vogue;
the cover. Mexican
Vogue,
not American
Vogue.
Big difference. But I wasn’t going to complain. Then I went to Greece, to shoot a cover for
Vogue;
Greek
Vogue.
Next, I was on a plane to South Africa, sitting in the first-class section next to a large woman, admiring the pictures Irving Penn had taken of me at Jones Beach, along with Patti Hansen and Shawn Casey.

The large woman was eating peanuts, and she recognized me, and she went to say something . . . but one of the peanuts got lodged in her throat. Her large neck started to blow up like a balloon. And the next thing I know she’s on her back, in the aisle, her skin a deep shade of purplish blue. And I’m watching the stewardess perform an emergency tracheotomy. It was so horrible I had to watch.

The plane made an emergency landing, and the woman

survived. Everyone was so impressed with the heroic stewardess that they applauded. I applauded, too. I was thinking,
The next time somebody chokes on my beauty, I’ll
know how to save their life.

One afternoon, back in the States, where I remained unfairly underappreciated, I got a call from Calvin. It was strange: I’d misbehaved during the runway show, and I’d made fun of his knee socks, and he
still
wanted to be my best friend. But suddenly it became crystal clear. He was doing a major show in Japan, for Isotan—the big department store. I was a star in

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

Japan. One of my first big shoots with Mike had been for Suntori liquors. The result—a poster of me, head to toe, in a skintight yellow bathing suit—had become a collector’s item. In other words, Calvin needed me.

The minute the chartered plane took off, of course, someone offered me some drugs. Since we didn’t want to risk getting busted in Tokyo, we figured we might as well consume everything then and there. I had tons of friends on the flight—among them Iman and Charlie Haughk—and under the influence of the drugs I just let loose and joined the bacchanal. Some people were doing lines on their pull-out trays, a couple of gay boys were fucking in the bathroom. It was wild. Some were trying on clothes for the show and walking around the plane bare-assed. I was photographing everything. One famous model pushed her crotch in my face and HAVING A LITTLE TOO MUCH FUN

AT A FUNERAL PROCESSION

IN TOKYO.

ªªªªªªªªªªªªª

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said “take this” and I did. I have a wonderful photograph of a famous pussy, but that’s not for sale either.

Once in Tokyo, all of us managed, miraculously, to

pull ourselves together for the first show, but I ran into a little problem on the second day. I was in makeup, getting ready for Round Two, when I saw a bottle of Vitamin C. I thought I felt a cold coming on—my nose was running, though of course it was the cocaine—so I

helped myself to a couple.

Turns out they were somebody’s Quaaludes, in disguise.

And they kicked in, big-time, about a minute before I was due to step onto the runway. One of the assistants saw I was in trouble and propped me up on a stool. Calvin came walking past just as I slid to the floor. I couldn’t have timed it better, but what choice did I have? My spine had turned to jelly. Charlie Haughk hurried over and tried to set me back on the stool.

“What the fuck is going on?” Calvin said between