Thing of Beauty (22 page)

The
Bazaar
invitation left Gia in an enviable bind. She had to decide between a week “down the shore” and her second free trip to Italy in as many months.

With less than a day to recover from her European trip, Gia picked up where she had left off in New York—the daily grind of appointments, jobs and chores. Since she was becoming established, the jobs were getting bigger, the appointments more important, and her time more valuable: when jobs got canceled at the last minute, she was paid for the privilege of holding her day open. During her first week back, a
Vogue
sitting with Irving Penn was canceled and paid. With the ante so increased, it was also beginning to matter more if she was late. And she was
often
late. The agency had already given her a little talk on the subject. It was unprofessional, they explained, and nobody wanted to hire someone who was unprofessional.

The agency was also a little concerned by the nudity in the shots Gia had done with Von Wangenheim. It wasn’t that the pictures were inappropriate for European magazines. They just wanted Gia to understand that if she did too many nudes in Europe, it could mean problems with more conservative clients in the states. There were many American catalogs and manufacturers that worried about being associated with a young woman known for posing
nude. Apparently, when a nipple or pubic hair was exposed rather than hinted at, a girl’s visual virginity was spoiled. The same executives who wanted to wander onto the set in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the models dressing fretted that their company’s image could be compromised by a model who took her clothes off for the camera.

And the top people at Wilhelmina knew that, besides his work for the fashion magazines, Von Wangenheim was becoming a favorite with art directors at
Playboy
and
Oui
—the European men’s magazine
Playboy
was spinning off in America to compete with
Penthouse. Oui
especially was beginning to understand how fruitful a relationship with a photographer like Von Wangenheim or Helmut Newton could be: their kinkiest fashion concepts, rejected by their regular fashion clients, could be reborn as erotic fantasy sequences in men’s magazines. It was often a particular photographer’s comfortable relationship with a particular model—and not the model’s deep desire to pose nude—that led to pictorials in these magazines. It was also the casualness fostered by these comfortable relationships that led models to sign releases for pictures they might later regret.

Usually, the problem wasn’t the suggestive pictures so much as the “context.” As Gia had to explain to her mother—like so many other models before her—nudes in European magazines were “different.” Europeans had a more “sophisticated” concept of what nudity meant. Only in American men’s magazines were nude pictures of women considered smut: not because they were pornographic pictures, but because they were printed with pornographic intent.

“When she first started,
Playboy
wanted her to do a spread and she wouldn’t do it,” recalled Kathleen Sperr. “She told me you had to be very careful. In Europe, her tits are hanging out all over. But if you do it as part of a ‘fashion statement,’ it’s acceptable. But you can’t let it hang out in a sex way.”

After Gia returned from Europe, it was becoming clearer that her new life and her old life were going to have trouble coexisting. The sudden need to choose between a week in Atlantic City and a week in Capri was just the beginning.
It was easy to understand why so many of the
fashionistas
were, for all intents and purposes, runaways—people who had left their small towns for New York with no thoughts of ever coming back. The fashion world was its own huge, dysfunctional family and a very demanding one: it was a hard life to reconcile with parents and siblings and friends back home. For a while, the people from Gia’s treated her like she was away at fashion boot camp and correctly assumed that she was too busy to stay in touch. But now, people were beginning to seek her out—because she was becoming successful, and because she was the only one they knew who had a place in Manhattan. Some of her old friends were jealous of her, some wanted to be closer to her than ever before. Some assumed that she would mistrust
anyone
who seemed overly friendly, so they avoided her to make sure she couldn’t accuse them of fair-weather friendship. Others just had completely unrealistic ideas about what Gia’s success really meant.

“I remember having lunch with Gia in a restaurant by Bloomingdale’s that first summer,” said John Long. “She was with this hanger-on, some Philly person trying to follow her to New York on her coattails. She kept asking, ‘Can my other friends stay at your place? Can you get us on the guest list at Studio 54?’

“And Gia was trying to explain that there
was
no guest list. That sometimes you would go and the doorman would ask who you were with and then point ‘You, you, and him,’ and literally break up the parties anyway. Gia couldn’t
guarantee
to get anybody in—except herself. But the girl kept asking and finally Gia just said, ‘Tell yourself whatever you need to hear, you’re the only one listening.’”

Gia’s friend Toni O’Connor, growing tired of her life dealing Quaaludes in Philadelphia, decided to move to New York, encouraged by Gia’s success. “She talked me into coming to New York, getting an apartment and going to acting school,” O’Connor recalled, “and then she had to take all these jobs that were in Italy and I’d never get to see her, I was really lonely. She was about the only person I knew in New York.

“I’d hang out at Studio 54. Jack Nicholson tried to put the make on her at Studio and I flipped out. He was in love
with Gia, he worshiped the ground she walked on. She got off on it. She was like ‘I can’t stand him, he’s an
old man.’
She really laughed about it. We went a couple times and he really pursued her. I got more upset than anything because it was like, Jack Nicholson,
come on
, he was like
a major star.
How can I compete with Jack Nicholson?”

Gia’s friendship with Sharon Beverly was also growing rockier. “We just weren’t getting along,” Sharon recalled. “We would just argue about everything and anything. One time we had a really big fight because she thought that I wasn’t happy for her. I
was
, but I was scared for her at the same time and I just didn’t want to encourage it one hundred percent. So when she would come home and she would say, ‘I saw this photographer,’ inside I felt ‘That’s really good for her because that’s what she’s up here for, but I’m really afraid’ … Also, she was starting to work a lot and I wasn’t. She started getting good jobs and she felt funny about it, felt a little guilty.”

It wasn’t just that Gia had more money than she or her friends had ever had before. Her trip to Europe had been a guided tour through the many ways that money—real money—could be spent. For years, she had observed, and occasionally even lived, the high life in Philadelphia. But now she was beginning to see the difference between
regional
standards of luxury and international standards: a new sky was the limit. After her return, she started going to Studio 54 more often, occasionally even on weeknights. She also began buying herself some clothes. These were, after all,
business
expenses. There was no place to make better business contacts than at Studio 54, and she had to be able to look the part.

And the way she looked—her face, her body—would undoubtedly make a big difference in the kinds of bookings she got. So $725 for a membership to the European Health Spa seemed like a reasonable expense. Especially when she could now cover the entire fee in a day or two of catalog shootings, and still have plenty left over for a $100 gift for her agency booker and the $10 admission at Studio, where she never had to pay for drinks. Her rent was only $445 a month, an amount she was now easily clearing. On Friday, September 1, for example, she picked up an agency check
for $1382. Then she got a cab and caught her plane to Rome, where she connected for Naples and then Capri. Atlantic City could wait.

When she arrived on the bucolic island off Italy’s southwestern coast, Gia was installed in one of the twenty-two bedrooms in Mr. Della Schiava’s castle. She was also promptly introduced to a friend of Peponi’s—an older man who apparently had been admiring her from a distance during the
alta moda
in Rome. The sixty-year-old Francesco di Siricinano was Italian royalty: like a lot of people on the buying end of the fashion world, he was from some obscure royal family with tons of money to waste and several generations waiting in line to waste it. Gia quickly dubbed him The Prince. “Everyone knew The Prince was in love with her,” recalled
Bazaar
fashion editor Lizzette Kattan. “He was mesmerized by her. That first day they were going to be together, we were saying it was D-Day. He was taking her out to see the island.”

By the end of the week, Gia was being made to feel one of the
Bazaar
family, a high-profile position in fashionable Italy, In the evening, after dinner, they would stroll Capri’s busy streets and sometimes be photographed together by paparazzi. Gia became more affectionate around Lizzette. She began to refer to her as “Mommy.” At the same time, The Prince became more affectionate around Gia. He gave her a cross to wear around her neck. She began to think he was serious when he said he wanted to marry her.

The week after she returned to the States from her whirlwind vacation, Gia got to go to Atlantic City after all. She came not as Gia Carangi, who had been going “down the shore” for years, but as Gia, top model, on assignment for
Vogue.
She and Lisa Vale, another former Philadelphian, modeled glamorous gowns in the Resorts casino, and then went out on the Boardwalk and tried to look not so much overheated as
protected from the freezing cold
by their $10,000 furs. It was a balmy September afternoon, but the shots were for December.

W
ith the collections and August vacation well behind it, the fashion world settled into its annual fall work marathon. But the fall of 1978 was more hectic than usual, with more than its share of peculiar plot twists.

The New York Times
had been on strike for several weeks, which meant that 1.6 million copies of the crucial fall “Fashions of the Times” supplements were still sitting in a warehouse rather than tempting buyers with over 150 pages of expensive ads. The papers that were published teemed with news about a murder that doubled as a modeling business scandal. The owner of the small My Fair Lady agency, well-known horse trainer and model chaser Buddy Jacobson, was accused of shooting, bludgeoning, slicing and burning the remains of Jack Tupper, a bar owner on the Upper East Side. Tupper was supposedly having an affair with Melanie Cain, the former Ford model with whom Jacobson had opened the agency. On the same day as the murder—purely coincidentally, as it turned out—another My Fair Lady model fell to her death from the balcony of the apartment she was renting from Jacobson.

All this just made life in the upper echelons of fashion—which Gia was in the process of entering—additionally chaotic. But since the “Model Wars” were now entering their second year, the agencies had grown to expect that even normal days would have a baseline level of insanity.

The so-called model wars had officially begun in the spring of 1977, but they had their roots in the time-honored economic traditions of the beauty-industrial complex. In the history of the fashion world, many large companies had made sizable fortunes. But few so-called “creative” people had become really rich and hardly any of them really expected to. Being fabulous and living fabulously was supposed to be enough.

There had been a few exceptions to this rule. A handful of designers received handsome salaries—and sometimes even partnerships—from the manufacturers that employed them. Halston was one of the first, signing a much-publicized deal for $16 million in 1973 for the five-year-old company he had started after leaving Bergdorf Goodman. Some very commercial photographers commanded high fees; a few really hard-working models could boast annual incomes of over $100,000 during their peak years; and even some hairstylists had used their fame to build profitable salon chains or hair care product lines. Random House had reportedly paid Way Bandy a $100,000 advance for his makeup book. But most of the creative people weren’t really rich, they just lived rich lifestyles during the years they worked for the top clients.

But when the designers started to become businessmen in the mid-seventies—with Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein following Halston—their friends in fashion began to take notice. And soon photographers, models, hair and makeup people became more interested in making their own money. They wanted contracts, long-term commitments: Avedon was reported to have a lucrative one with
Vogue
—it was said that the magazine paid one million dollars a year to keep him from shooting editorial fashion for anyone else—and several models had signed with perfume companies to be the Babe girl or the Charlie girl. They wanted to know why photographers and models couldn’t get residuals if pictures were reused: most fashion photographs were still shot for flat, one-time fees that included
all rights.

And then Johnny Casablancas showed up in New York and kicked the modeling industry in its perfect butt.

Casablancas, then thirty-five, was a man with a European heart and an American brain: born in Spain, raised in Manhattan. His father had been a banker, his mother a former
model for the Spanish couture house Balenciaga, and his family money came from an international textile-machine concern. After a brief first marriage and life in Brazil, he moved to Paris and fell in love with former Miss Denmark and budding model Jeanette Christiansen. Casablancas opened his own small agency, Elysee 3, and learned what he could about the arcane business of finding beautiful women and getting them paid to be photographed. While doing so, he became friendly with many young photographers, even briefly representing some of them. His photographer friends included Alex Chatelain, Arthur Elgort, Mike Reinhardt, John Stember, Patrick Demarchelier and Jacques Malignon—the core group that moved from Paris to New York in the mid-seventies and became known as the French Mafia when they began to control so much of the city’s lucrative photography work.