Thing of Beauty (19 page)

“And that gossip is important because the whole business is based on hot air. Because when you really get right down to it, for most jobs there are at least maybe a hundred photographers that can do an excellent job, maybe more than a hundred. Yet there are only a few who are really making it. And what really impacts their success is not really the quality of their work as much as what
surrounds
it.”

After sitting through a two-hour round of shoptalk, Gia went with the rest of the crew to the top floor, where the first shot was already set up. Nobody had considered just how windy it would be up on the roof, and they were unprepared for the odd sensation of a seventy-two-story skyscraper that seemed to be swaying in the breeze. The models and the dresses they were wearing—either strapless or
spaghetti-strapped—were being buffeted about. The only choices were to stand stiff against the breeze, or roll with it.

“I was wearing this really great slinky black dress … it made me feel good,” Gia would later tell an interviewer about the shooting. “And I really got into a groove and kept moving all over with it. And then one shoulder slipped, and then the other. And before I realized it, the whole top was down.

“And I went to fix it and the photographer said, ‘No, that’s great.’ And I thought, ‘Why not?’ My tits looked good.”

Photo sessions were generally planned so that they didn’t require much spontaneity: part of being a professional photographer was knowing how to make sure a good picture ensued even if everything from the chemistry to the clothes was a disaster. But everyone hoped that events during the session would create a better image than the one they planned. Each day that took on a theme of its own, each pleasant surprise, was proof that the process of creating photographs could still be creative. In this case, Gia’s bared breasts became the impromptu visual theme of the rooftop session. She posed in another dress with the top pulled down; two other low-cut dresses were photographed in more conventional poses. At the end of each day of shooting, Gia got a voucher for eighty dollars—her standard editorial rate for an eight-hour booking—and left without any idea which photographs would be used in the magazine. If the topless shots were edited out, cropped or reproduced postage-stamp size, it would be as if they had never been taken at all.

On Monday, Italian
Bazaar
booked Gia again for the day. Tuesday she did more Bloomingdale’s work with Elgort—at the advertising rate of $750 a day—and finished too late to fill another
Bazaar
request. On Wednesday, she worked with Von Wangenheim for
Bazaar
again. Thursday she went to be looked over for a Bobby Brooks bathing suit ad.

The next week Von Wangenheim booked her for one of his
Vogue Patterns
assignments. While history would later enshrine pages from
Vogue
and
Bazaar
, there was probably no publication more revelatory of the true life of the fashion photographer in the late seventies than
Vogue Patterns.
The
odd, hybrid publication had begun as the pattern-book magazine for those who wanted to sew the clothes they saw in
Vogue
, but it was later sold to the Butterick Company, publishers of several clothing and sewing pattern catalogs. Top photographers tried to avoid doing catalog shots, because even though the money was terrific, the pictures were, by definition, completely boring. But
Patterns
wasn’t the usual catalog. Instead of a has-been or never-to-be art director,
Patterns
had hired twenty-four-year-old Marc Balet, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate who had won the Prix de Rome design competition and was earning a hundred dollars a week as the art director at
Interview
, the most visually avant-garde mass circulation publication in the country.

When Balet gave notice to take the higher-paying
Patterns
job, Warhol insisted the young designer continue art directing
Interview
as a freelancer. This double life of Balet’s was a bonanza for the handful of photographers who could do both kinds of work. They had grown accustomed to shooting for Balet almost for free. Now they had
Patterns
, too. Not only did it pay well—$350 to $500 a shot for pictures that could be churned out so fast that it wasn’t hard to gross $25,000 in a good week—but
Patterns
offered the kinds of trips that were usually only available from fashion magazines.

Because of the pattern book’s tenuous association with
Vogue
, Pan Am would fly a
Patterns
crew anywhere in the world for free as long as the airline got a prominent plug, like a shot with a plane or pilots in the background. Hotels around the world offered rooms and meals for similar treatment. Because of this arrangement, it was actually cheaper for Balet to shoot in Bali than in a studio in New York.

The pictures in the magazine often amounted to absurd parodies of real fashion photographs. In one monthly feature, a
Patterns
reader was profiled and scenes from her life were photo-realized with a model like Patti Hansen playing her and wearing clothes made with the company’s sewing patterns. The pictures Von Wangenheim shot of Gia for Balet were similarly forgettable. But work for
Vogue Patterns
wasn’t for your book, it was for your pocketbook.

On June 19, Monday morning, both
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
sent for Gia. This time, it wasn’t a go-see her booker had fought for. The fashion czarinas had heard that their top photographers were delighted with a new girl. But not just any new girl. A new girl who was too short, too dark, too ethnic, too voluptuous, and too rebellious to be a model. But she was still perfect.

And the new girl didn’t need their clothes or their makeup in order to look stunning. In her vintage store men’s clothes, with her face clean-scrubbed, her long hair in her face, and a cigarette dangling from her lips, she was already a fashion statement. She was a high fashion version of those creepy New Wave rockers they were hearing so much about. She was a Beautiful Punk. She also looked completely androgynous but in a highly provocative way. She was a butch pinup girl.

Because she had an uptown-downtown quality—and what they politely called “that boy-girl thing”—Gia would be able to make things that “just weren’t
Vogue”
look like they belonged in
Vogue.
So the magazine didn’t waste a minute in snatching her up. They booked a shooting with Von Wangenheim on Thursday. Unfortunately, they chose for Gia’s first shot the one part of her anatomy least suited to modeling—her hands, with those fingernails that had barely survived years of continual biting. Von Wangenheim and the manicurist used every trick they could think of, but the shots were killed because her nails were just too rough. But
Vogue
booked her again for the following Monday.

In the meantime, Wilhelmina realized she had a budding star on her hands. The agency canceled Gia’s Friday appointments so she and Wilhelmina could have lunch and talk business. Gia had inquired several weeks before about getting a year’s guarantee of $25,000 from the agency. Back then, such a commitment was out of the question. Suddenly, it was clear Gia would be making much more than that.

At lunch, Willie and Gia discussed the eighteen-year-old’s future: what kind of work she wanted to do, which photographers she’d like to meet. Willie wanted Gia to meet with the people from Paris Planning, the agency that represented Wilhelmina models in France. After the meeting, Gia left town to spend the weekend with Chris von Wangenheim
and a skeleton crew on Fire Island, where they went to do some testing. On Monday, she arrived at noon for her next
Vogue
try, a beauty shot by Arthur Elgort with Way Bandy doing makeup.

Even in the upper reaches of the fashion photography business, there were still some stars who shone more brightly: some because they were more talented than everyone else, others because they were simply more intriguing
characters
or more aggressively self-publicized. Way Bandy had somehow managed to become great at what he did—not just as a makeup artist, but as a peacekeeper in the most difficult work situations—and make his flamboyance and high profile work for him. He was one of the few figures in the industry who was well-known to the general public and still well-respected by his peers.

Tall and thin with thick, dark hair cut into a longish pageboy and a penchant for dramatic clothes and entrances, Bandy was a charming and mysterious figure in the business. No one knew his real name or his real age (he was thirty-seven) or who he had been before becoming Way Bandy, getting a nose job and inventing what would become the industry prototype of the uncloseted gay makeup artist. It was said that he had been an English teacher in North Carolina and had been married before coming to New York for a visit in the mid-sixties and never going back. He was hired as a makeup teacher at a modeling school and then went to Charles of the Ritz as makeup director. In 1971, he did the makeup for the Broadway show
No, No, Nanette
and left Charles the next year to freelance. His fame was established by 1974, when he and hairstylist Maury Hopson, his best friend, transformed Watergate wife Margaret Mitchell into a cover girl.

Bandy’s legend had recently been marketed nationally as a slim, how-to book titled
Designing Your Face.
In an industry rife with chemical excess—the traditional, classic diet pill to keep weight down and the more fashionable, modern cocaine—Bandy was known for his vegetarianism, his obsession with nutrition and naturopathy, and his growing expertise in spiritual well-being. Very active on the downtown club scene, his indulgences were mostly sexual.

Bandy always insisted that his makeup technique was the
same as everyone else’s, but he had a signature style. He used all-natural makeup from little jars with antique silver lids, which he carried in a lacquered box tied with a bandana. And he believed in heavy makeup and complete reshaping of facial features. He was a stickler for perfect eyebrows, and many models especially recalled the first time their faces were done by Way Bandy, both for the dramatic finished product and the tingly, red skin they felt beneath the surface of beige and white liquid foundations mixed with skin lotion and distilled water. Brooke Shields was one of the only models who had been spared Bandy’s tweezers. Her mother, Teri, had forbidden it, but he had a standing request to be the first to pluck them.

Bandy’s makeup job on Gia rendered her stunning, divine, but nearly unrecognizable as herself. The pictures were to accompany a story on the “beauty collections”: the most recent of the fashion-oriented “events” created almost entirely to give
Vogue
and other magazines an excuse to “cover” cosmetics as if they were a breaking news story. The news for 1978 was that “Color Is It!” “Color and how it is used,” so said the Fall Beauty Report, “is the thing to watch. In makeup, in clothes, in accessories. For day, for evening, color is the big change now … and getting bigger all the time.” In order to illustrate how “the whole attitude about color has changed,” Bandy painted Gia’s face several severe shades of sienna and drastically elongated her eyes.

It would be months before the results of the session were printed—Vogue had a much longer lead time than Italian
Bazaar
, and these pictures would run, if at all, in October. But Gia and Way Bandy forged a fast friendship that produced more immediate results. Bandy offered to help her get jobs. Since he was so closely associated with Francesco Scavullo, it was only a matter of time before Gia would be considered for one of the
Cosmopolitan
covers Scavullo’s studio had churned out every month since the late sixties.

Gia worked Wednesday for a paper company, at a day rate of $500, and Thursday for Von Wangenheim for
Patterns.
Friday
Vogue
booked her again, this time with photographer Stan Malinowski to model furs.

Over the long Fourth of July weekend, which she spent in Atlantic City with Toni O’Connor, Gia decided it was time to speak with Wilhelmina about raising her daily editorial rate to $100, increasing her workload so she was modeling every day, and broadening the number of photographers using her regularly. And over the next two weeks, the variety of her work did expand. She did
Vogue
editorial shots with still-life specialist Nobu, who filled in when Irving Penn canceled at the last minute. She worked with two of the top female fashion photographers: Andrea Blanche on a
Vogue
location shot on Roosevelt Island and Jean Pagliuso on a two-day, $1,500 catalog job for Saks Fifth Avenue.

Her biweekly agency check, less commissions, was for $1,530. She put $400 into a savings account, $500 into a checking account. The rest she spent on luggage and put into traveler’s checks. In four days, she was scheduled to leave for Italy.
Bazaar
fashion editor Lizzette Kattan, who seemed to be almost single-handedly launching Gia’s career, had booked her for a two-and-a-half-week European trip. She would model the high fashion collections in Rome and Paris—the
alta moda
and the
haute couture
—and then double back to Milan, where
Bazaar’s
main office was, to shoot whatever was left over. The fees were negligible. But the trip was all-expenses-paid, and
Bazaar’s
September collections issue, which sometimes ran as high as 1,200 pages and came in two volumes, was one of the best opportunities in the industry for exposure.

Gia would be arriving in Rome just after the July-August issue of
Bazaar
hit the Italian newsstands. The issue included the Elgort fall fashion shooting, from which five shots of Gia were used, and the Citicorp shots by Von Wangenheim. The beauty and fashion feature opened with a shot of Gia and the other model, a “double,” silhouetted against the New York skyline. On the next right-hand page—the right-hand page of a magazine spread being more important since the eye tends to seek it first—was Gia, leaning against a railing in a black Krizia dress with one breast exposed. The next spread was just Gia—looking, as one model agent put it, “achingly beautiful”—in outfits that were so low-cut that her breasts didn’t really need to be further exposed. To finish the spread, the
Bazaar
art director had plucked a shot
Von Wangenheim had done of Gia and another model in the studio several days after the Citicorp session: a nude in which Gia appeared wearing only a veil and some shade of lipstick attributed to Revlon.