Thing of Beauty (48 page)

“She said she would show up for a shoot and all the models were in their furs and diamonds, all the big names, and she’d walk in with dungarees and a leather jacket and they’d all look. ‘I blew them away,’ she said. She didn’t like having to play glamorous. She didn’t like modeling that much, although she explained that being in front of the camera was some magical thing with her: your body goes into a different phase. She knew how to be on. But she didn’t like it.

“There was one thing, though. Those Calvin Klein underwear ads had just started coming out, the ones with the women’s stuff that looked like men’s stuff. We were reading
a magazine and we came to that ad. She said, ‘See this? I should have this ad.’ She was mad that she wasn’t the Calvin Klein underwear girl.”

Her envy of the Calvin Klein underwear girl was more than just a feeling that someone else had successfully copped her attitude. The modeling world was buzzing over the unprecedented exclusive contract Klein was signing with South African model Jose Borain to be the signature face and body for all the products with the Klein name. She would do Avedon-directed TV ads for clothes and perfume, Bruce Weber still photographs, runway work, everything. For a hundred days of work per year. Borain would be paid $1 million over three years. For that fee, she wasn’t allowed to model for anyone else, and couldn’t even leave New York for more than a weekend without the designer’s permission. It was the biggest modeling deal since Carol Alt’s contract with Lancôme, and far more important. The Klein contract was a whole new concept, born of the incredible marketability of a designer’s name and visual signature.

“Gia talked about Wilhelmina and about some of the photographers, which I loved to hear,” Stewart recalled. “She talked about Chris and his wife, about Scavullo, Helmut Newton. Chris and Scavullo were the photographers she seemed to really like. Andrea Blanche she mentioned. She told me about walking out on Avedon. She said they were doing the Versace campaign with the big camera and it took so long to shoot everything—like shooting a still life with people. She said all the models were dressed and he was taking a long time because he couldn’t get one set-up right and she was just sitting around and he didn’t even have the courtesy to come back and say, ‘Look, girls, I’m sorry for tile delay.’ She was there for so long, she had just had it So she went to the bank or to get cigarettes or something and just didn’t come back. She said he had no respect for people that way and a lot of people in the business applauded her because it was about time somebody put him in his place.

“Gia and I liked a lot of the same music. She told me some story about Mick Jagger. She was
obsessed
with Keith Richards, obsessed. But she said she was at a Stones concert and she was backstage with Mick Jagger and he wanted to kiss her, or he
did
kiss her, and she was so frightened that
Jerry Hall would walk in. She said he wanted to get it on with her but she didn’t want any part of it. If it was me, I would’ve kissed him just for the sake of kissing Mick Jagger.

“She talked about the guys from Blondie, about hanging out and playing pool with Jimmy Destri. She was a
big
Debbie Harry fan. She was in the ‘Eat to the Beat’ video. There’s one scene where everyone’s dancing in this club, the camera goes by her. She liked them a lot. She said she met Bowie at somebody’s apartment. She said it was a very ordinary meeting. He wasn’t a jerk. He was more friendly than she expected and seemed to want to get to know her better.”

Gia’s father would occasionally come upstairs to knock on her door and see if she was all right. “He brought up some sheets,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Here, Gia, put these on your bed.’ They were satin sheets, black. She said, ‘You know why he gave me these? Because he knows you’re up here and he’s happy when I’m with somebody because he knows I’m not doing drugs.’ He thought she couldn’t have sex when she was doing drugs.

“At one point, I had to be somewhere to take pictures for a friend and I said I had to go home. She didn’t want me to leave. She made me stay. How? She, um, jumped on the bed and took all her clothes off and practically threw herself at me. There are a lot of women that are just pretty, but Gia wasn’t pretty, it was so much deeper than that. It was very deep. And she was a great manipulator of people. I stayed. When I finally did leave, I had to go to my parents’ house and she came with me. She met my parents. My mother said, ‘She’s very beautiful and very sad.’

“I collected old toys from the fifties. I had a little red toy VW and rubbery kinds of monsters: she was fascinated by them. She sat on my bed and, for about an hour, we played. She said, ‘This one is me,’ and she put them in the little car. ‘Let’s go to Camden to get drugs!’ Later that day, when I took her back to her apartment, she gave me this little figurine, green and fangs and pointy ears, it had a cape and a
G
on it. She said, “This is me when I’m not on my medications.’ She also gave me this friendship ring—two clasping hands with a heart—and a picture of her and her cat that lived at her mother’s house.

“That last day she started getting really weird. Right before we left her apartment, she went into the bathroom and was in there for a while. When she came out she said, ‘What did you think? I was shooting up?’ When she gave me the picture, she said, ‘Don’t lose this picture,’ and I just had a real strange feeling. She was giggling and giggling. I now think that she got high.”

Even though their week together had ended on such an odd note, Patty had high hopes for something lasting with Gia. But, the romance ended as soon as Patty left Gia’s sight They had made tentative plans to get together the next weekend, but Gia wouldn’t return Patty’s calls to firm things up. Gia’s father or brother had to make apologetic phone excuses: Gia wasn’t home, she was sleeping.

“After calling her about ten times over the next couple days,” Patty recalled, “it finally clicked that she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Then she said to my friend Vicky, ‘That girl Patty is really a pest.’ Finally, she told Vicky what had happened, and told her to tell me she wanted the picture back. Vicky had already been through some disappointments with Gia herself, so she had sorta warned me. But I was heartbroken. I was a sucker.

“I called Gia again, but her father said she wasn’t in. So I took the picture over to Vicky’s place at the Shore. After dropping it off, I’m walking to my car, and in the shadows there’s Gia. And she runs up to me crying Patty, Patty. She wants to borrow twenty dollars from me. She did too much heroin and she had to get coke to combat it. She was crying and sobbing on my lap. She said, ‘I’ll do
anything!’
Oh, it was so hard to witness that. She was talking real slow. She didn’t sound right, like she had had a lobotomy or something. I just felt so sad and sorry for her. I gave her the twenty dollars and I said, ‘I’m coming with you, I’ll bring you back home.’ I took her to a
really
horrible part of town. She got the drugs. I brought her back home. She said, ‘I’m not ready for a relationship, I’m not ready to get involved with anybody.’

“I said, ‘So, what was it, tell me that, what was going on, was it a fling, what? I mean, it boggled me too. I hadn’t planned on falling in love in five days.’ She said, ‘I changed my mind, can’t we just be friends?’

“I said she had no reason to shut me out of her life. She didn’t know too many people who didn’t do drugs. She thought I was too straight, I guess. I remember at one point, I started crying and I told her about one of my best friends from school. ‘They just found her dead. She went scuba diving, she was high. She reminded me a lot of you, Gia.’ I told her I didn’t want something like that to happen to her. She just looked at me and said, ‘It’s not gonna happen to me, any doctor will tell you that you have to take coke when you do too much heroin.’ I just ended up leaving …”

In New York, Gia had become one of the biggest “whatever happened to” stories in the modeling industry. She would join the “where are they now” queens like Ann Simonton, the former Ford model and 1974
Sports Illustrated
cover girl who left the business in 1979, cut off her trademark long red hair and became one of the most fervent feminist activists in the country. Based in Southern California, Simonton became part of what previously had been a small annual protest against the Miss California contest, held every June in Santa Cruz. The month was an especially significant one for Simonton; she had been gang-raped at knifepoint in Manhattan on the way to a modeling job in June of 1971, and decided to quit the business after seeing herself in a department store ad, peeking provocatively from under the comforter that was on sale. “The connection between what I was doing and the rape hit me full force,” she said.

Her tactics against the pageant and other exploitation of women had slowly escalated. She and other feminists founded the “Myth Kalifornia” pageant and protested by wearing dresses made of meat; an
anti-Hustler
magazine poster was made of Simonton lying down nude as three men, holding a sign reading “We Stand On Our First Amendment Rights,” planted their feet on her. But it wasn’t until Simonton’s past as a top model was revealed in 1983—by another member of the group—that the story of her protest became national. That’s when she also began telling specific tales of degradation from her career, like the lingerie shooting during which the agency people analyzed her anatomy. “I found myself bent over in a girdle,” she said, “with a grown man and woman studying my derriere, saying, ‘What do you
think’ … ‘I’m not sure, what do you think.’” Her exposure would allow her to become a one-woman national protest against modeling and pornography. She founded the organization Media Watch and lectured nationally.

A model-fights-back story of another sort had just unfolded in Italy. In late June of 1984, a troubled, twenty-six-year-old aspiring model named Terry Broome fulfilled the
other
fantasy of every young girl who came to Milan to build a portfolio. She gunned down one of the city’s most prominent playboys, Francesco D’Alessio. Broome would later tell an Italian reporter that the first time she met D’Alessio he “walked up to her, suggested they have sex and, opening his fly, extracted his erect penis and began manipulating it vigorously.” On the night in question, D’Alessio had asked the coked-up Broome if she wanted to go to bed, mentioning he would be happy to call some friends if “one man wasn’t enough” for her, whereupon she pulled a pistol from the pocket of her black Fiorucci jacket and shot him four times. Broome was sitting in a Milan jail awaiting trial, but her feat was already being viewed, in more ways than one, as
the
seminal event in the social life of the Milanese modeling world. “The story of Milano ends with Terry Broome,” lamented playboy Giorgio Repossi. “We suddenly realize that it is playing with fire. And it is sad, because this girl wasn’t really a model, and this guy she kill, I not like him, he always belong to the group that was less clean. My group was more of a pure group. He was a strange person. He was gambling. He was a ball-breaker alive and a ball-breaker when he died.”

But Gia’s professional demise hadn’t been quite so newsworthy. Like Chris von Wangenheim, Gia and her career simply disappeared one day. All that was left were a dusty portfolio stored in the basement at Elite, and the eight 5 x 7 cards in the
Vogue
library model file, detailing her appearances in the magazine. No other fashion magazine bothered to keep track of which models had appeared on their pages, and only a few libraries kept back issues of the publications. Gia’s work was most easily found in the salons and boutiques and doctor’s offices that were less diligent about updating the magazines in their waiting areas.

Only the
fashionistas
who had worked with her still told
the Gia stories, as the young man from the Northeast who had once called himself Joey Bowie found out. After his years of Bowie craziness, Joe McDevit went to New York as well, working with Larry Cannon, who did all the wigs for the Metropolitan Opera. After seven years with the opera, McDevit moved to Paris and then Milan in 1983 to break in as a makeup artist. By 1984, he was doing good European editorial work, and meeting some of the people who had worked with Gia. A mention of his childhood association with her brought many stories.

“I remember [hairdresser] Howard Fugler told me Gia would come to the studio with pockets full of candy bars,” McDevit recalled. “She’d be stoned and needed something sweet. He’d try and do her hair and she’d keep dropping her head. He had to pick it up. I did the collections with Janice Dickinson in 1984 at the Grand Hotel. She had already pinnacled. She was on her way down, but she hadn’t gone to rehab yet. We were doing nude photos, of course, all these obscure poses. I remember walking into the studio the first time and she was sitting in a chair, naked. Janice was some incredible woman. The first thing she said to me was ‘Hey, boy, want a blowjob?’ Pure shock value, Janice. But she could still put on the tightest red dress, slither across the floor and the Italians went crazy for her. Someone in heaven loved her to still look like that after all the years of abuse she put herself through. She had been one of Gia’s get-high buddies. She talked about that. She said they’d lock themselves into the studio bathrooms for an hour at a time, get stoned and then stumble around the studio. Janice would say it was all a big joke.”

Gia’s disappearance brought a tear to a handful of fashion people, a sigh of relief to many others. Those who had bumped into her recently prayed for her. And those who knew her only during the first few years speculated on what had led her to destroy her beauty, her career, her life. In one of his many moments of indecision about staying in photography, Lance Staedler even wrote a film treatment about her. He had to piece together tales he had heard from other models over the years because, even though he had taken the first great test shot of Gia, they had never done an assignment together.

Gia would take shelter with any number of different people in Atlantic City during breakups with Rochelle. One couple whose lives she slipped in and out of was Ted Catrana,* a waiter at one of the bigger Atlantic City restaurants, and his wife Sherry.*