Thing of Beauty (10 page)

Timmy Mills was a neighborhood kid made bad, and one of the more extreme examples of the fringe characters who populated Gia’s life. Originally an older friend of Michael Carangi’s, Timmy had grown up right around the corner on Primrose Lane, and had been what his father described as a “model son” until the age of fourteen. That year his parents divorced, he changed schools and he discovered drugs.

“Timmy always had a little bit of everything,” recalled Michael. “He carried it around in this burlap bag hanging from his tenspeed. I was kind of his go-between, although I usually didn’t make any money on it. He was always great at a party: always had plenty of smoke, four different kinds, and he would just put it out, angel dust, PCP.”

Timmy’s mother left the Northeast for an apartment in Center City on Spruce Street, the notorious gay cruising district. It was there that he met an entire new group of people, including a rich old hippie named Fanshawe Lindsley, who went by the nickname “Togo” and was once a prominent member of Main Line society. Togo had been reduced to running a butler and maid service for people throwing parties, enabling him to meet an inordinate number of handsome young men like Timmy Mills. At fifteen, Timmy dropped out of school and began to stay out all night, sleep all day, and sell drugs to maintain his lifestyle. He remained friends with Michael Carangi. And as Gia grew older, he developed a crush on her.

Gia’s girlfriends found Timmy’s persistence pretty amusing. “I remember one night we all had tickets to see Roxy Music,” said Karen Karuza. “He was older than us and had a car so he was going to drive. It was a whole group of us girls and we met at my house. He came with Gia. They had been out to dinner, and it was around Valentine’s Day so
he had bought her a corsage with rosebuds, which was a sweet thing to do. When she got to my house she tore the corsage apart and gave everybody one of the roses: right in front of him, like it was nothing. She said she didn’t want anyone to feel left out.”

The next week, Timmy and Gia made plans for a small party at a mutual friend’s house in Bucks County. A number of people were driving up from Center City. One was Stevie Beverly,* a Sansom Village fixture who, in his oversize red glasses and high-waisted baggy pants, had made a reputation for doing makeovers and selling clothes—and occasionally sleeping with his new customers. Stevie had also taken a liking to Gia. Among the other guests were Ronnie Johnson and his new girlfriend, Roseanne Rubino.

Roseanne and Gia had become friendly while waiting in line at the Spectrum for several days to buy tickets to the next Bowie concert. “I’ll never forget, Gia showed up at the Spectrum with these orange marshmallow pumpkins for Halloween,” Roseanne recalled. “And she took a real liking to me: she would just hang around me. She was really friendly, lovable—this sweet girl with orange marshmallow pumpkins.”

At around eleven o’clock on that Friday evening in late February of 1975, Gia and Timmy arrived at the party. Timmy pulled out a combo platter of powders and fine smokeables. “He laid out lines of something that we just assumed was coke because nobody ever said it wasn’t,” recalled Roseanne. “Naturally the first people in line were me, Ronnie and Stevie. We each did two of these big lines and that was the last thing I remember. From what I hear we just keeled over on the floor. Somebody must have called an ambulance, because I woke up the next day in a hospital with my arms and legs strapped to a bed.”

The lines were PCP, and the afflicted five were in the hospital for weeks. Timmy and Gia had avoided the paramedics and police by hiding in the bathroom, eventually sneaking out the window. The police towed Timmy’s car away and eventually issued a warrant for his arrest on various drug and morals charges.

Those charges became a moot point several weeks later, when Timmy Mills was arrested for causing or aiding the
suicide of Togo Lindsley. The charge was later raised to murder when the bizarre circumstances of the death were revealed. Mills told police that he and Togo had made a suicide pact: they were to drive to a deserted stretch of highway where the twenty-year-old would shoot the sixty-five-year-old with a shotgun and then take his own life. If he fulfilled the bargain, Mills’ parents would receive a stipend from the Lindsley will.

Timmy claimed that at the moment of truth, he balked: Togo allegedly grabbed the gun, put it between his legs and pulled the trigger with his toe. Police experts insisted that Togo’s wound could not have been self-inflicted, but Mills was finally allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and was sentenced to less than two years in prison.

The sensational case was the subject of several front page newspaper stories. But one of the unreported highlights of the proceedings—or so the story circulated through the Center City club world—was that Gia dramatically kissed the defendant one day as he was being led into the courtroom. During the kiss, it was said, she passed Timmy a Quaalude she had popped into her mouth.

To some of Gia’s friends, the Timmy Mills saga was a billboard-sized omen. “I stayed away from Gia for a while after that whole thing,” recalled Ronnie Johnson. “It was starting to get a little scary.”

But nothing seemed to scare Gia. She was fearless the way only pretty girls can be when they realize they can get away with anything, even if they get caught. And she was dauntless the way only Quaaluded teens can be: so oblivious that they can trip down a flight of concrete steps—like the ones leading to the good seats at the Spectrum—only to get up and walk away like nothing ever happened. It wasn’t that Gia walked through minefields and miraculously missed every mine. The occasional explosion just didn’t seem to phase her.

One of Gia’s favorite ways of daring life was to shoplift. Although she had never actually been arrested, Gia was well-known to the security departments at most of Center City’s better department stores and boutiques. Friends had noticed that her wardrobe seemed to be expanding. She
began to mix inexpensive vintage clothes and army surplus with pricey pieces by Ralph Lauren and other top designers: never dresses or skirts, but blouses, sweaters, trousers and blazers. Few of these designer pieces had been paid for.

“She always ripped off good stuff,” recalled Nancy Adams. “Gucci, Halston … it wasn’t like she was going to the five and dime and ripping off lip gloss. She got briefcases, bathing suits, whatever she needed she got. She knew what she liked, she had expensive tastes and she couldn’t afford to buy these things herself. She was spoiled, but how many $500 sweaters does your father buy for you when you’re a teenager?”

Gia was amazed, she told friends, at how easy it was to take stuff from stores. It was incredible what you could get away with if you didn’t look the type. “Gia and I actually once went into Nan Duskin,” recalled Roseanne Rubino, “and we had army pants on, those balloon-leg army pants. We went into the dressing room, took a zillion things in, and we were very gracious. We ended up tying silk blouses around our legs under the army pants and walking out. I still wear some of those blouses today.”

“We all wore this cologne called The Baron, and patchouli oil, we got it at Wanamaker’s,” recalled Joe McDevit. “She’d get that during her daily shopping trips.”

Sometimes, Gia would go into Bonwit’s or Nan Duskin or Wanamaker’s and fill up an empty shopping bag, just to prove she could do it. Other times, she had specific goals in mind: birthday gifts, courtship presents.

Gia had fallen for a girl she met in the clubs called Nina*, a working-class Roxborough native with Main Line airs and long blond hair. Nina saw a silk Halston dress in the window at Bonwit’s that she
loved.
She just had to have it. Gia snuck into the window, undressed the mannequin, and smuggled out the dress. When Nina broke up with her, Gia cut up the dress with a pair of scissors.

Gia and some of her friends would also steal credit cards. Joanne Grossman, an established hairstylist in her midtwenties when she met fifteen-year-old Gia in an all-women’s club, was among those who had their credit cards stolen. Several days after the theft, Gia quietly came and told her where the cards were.

“I thought she did a lot of this stuff to get her mother’s attention,” recalled Grossman. “Gia had the kind of personality that yielded to a baby-sitter sometimes. She needed guidance—whether a mother, a lover, a sister, a nanny. She needed not to be left alone. And the one person she really wanted was her mother. Kathleen obviously wanted her own life and wanted her daughter to be strong enough to do it on her own, without her doing anything.”

By this time, it was clear that Gia’s living situation with her father wasn’t going to work out so well: her new stepmother was now pregnant, and Gia missed Lincoln and her friends in the Northeast. So she moved back in with her mother and stepfather. Kathleen was determined that things would not get out of control again, and tried to be much stricter than before. She dragged Gia to the family doctor and insisted he test her blood for the presence of cocaine. When she tested positive but denied having taken anything, Kathleen dragged her back again. The doctor refused to do the test. “What are you going to do?” Kathleen recalled the doctor telling her. “She went out, she partied, she did a little drugs. What are you going to do?”

None of Gia’s friends recalled her doing any more drugs than anybody else was doing at the time. “People did a lot of Quaaludes back then,” recalled Michael Carangi, who was in a position to know. “Gia didn’t drink a lot, she smoked pot, did ludes, did some acid. It wasn’t a big thing to her.”

“Gia loved Quaaludes,” recalled Toni O’Connor, who, by that time, was maintaining her new lifestyle by selling the big, pale-yellow sedatives. “Sometimes I thought Gia only loved me because I always had Quaaludes. I was, in my day, the Quaalude queen of Philadelphia—although I was so paranoid about getting busted that I told everyone I was a prostitute. I made a lot of money selling Quaaludes. I’d just go to the doctors and get them anytime. I had three different doctors I would go to. I would tell them I couldn’t sleep at night. Each doctor was good for thirty Quaaludes every two weeks. One doctor would mail prescriptions from California, can you believe it?”

Others in Gia’s crowd had also discovered the Quaalude
doctors. “I started going to a lot of the Quaalude doctors with a couple other friends,” recalled Roseanne Rubino. “We’d make the circuit. There was one doctor, this seedy little fag, always fucked up on something. He had this awful cinder block office in West Philly. You’d go and wait for hours with slimy people. He had this big sign:
THE DOCTOR DOES NOT DISPENSE THE DRUGS
. You’d sit down with him. He’d say, ‘What seems to be the problem?’ You’d say, ‘I can’t sleep, I’m trying to lose weight.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to prescribe methaqualone and Valium,’ and black beauties, whatever they were called. He’d give us these incredible prescriptions for great drugs.

“I started doing the Quaalude doctors after Ronnie Johnson and I broke up. That’s also when Gia and I had our little affair. She told me she was in love with me the first time we slept together. I thought that was kind of weird. I guess that, somehow, love wasn’t supposed to be part of it.”

“I know there were a lot of drugs,” recalled Joanne Grossman, “but in Gia’s case, at that point, I think her sexual habits were a lot more extreme than her drugs.”

“She was as promiscuous as everyone else in our group,” recalled a high school friend. “Pull out the phone book and I’ll tell you who I dated. I think there’s a memorial to me on the front lawn at Lincoln.”

“All our sex lives then were so bizarre,” recalled Joe McDevit. “I remember this huge orgy in a synagogue. We were all at Digits one night doing acid, and one of the guys announced that he had keys to a synagogue nearby—his father worked there or something. We went there, upstairs to this big conference room, put cushions on the floor and had this big party. At one point we dared my girlfriend to put on a show for us. She had never slept with a girl and she picked another girl who hadn’t either and they took off all their clothes and made love. Then I had to pick a boy who had never had sex with another boy, and we had fun, petting and fellatio and such. It was bizarre.”

As an alternative to the kinds of people Gia was encountering in the clubs and at concerts, photographer Joe Petrellis—who had become socially friendly with Kathleen and Henry—suggested that she meet his friend Jane Kirby Harris.
A tall, handsome woman in her late thirties, Harris was a former New York runway model and a fixture in Philadelphia. She was fashion director for the Philadelphia area Bonwit Teller stores and coordinated all their fashion shows. She maintained her reputation and continually expanded her public by teaching beauty and modeling courses.

In the store, she ran a beauty workshop for the daughters of Bonwit’s patrons, taught with manuals made available to retailers by
Seventeen
magazine and personalized by each instructor. Harris called her version “Project You.” The Seventeen course was devised to give young girls the basics of posture, exercise, diet, hair care, skin care, makeup, grooming, fashion and manners. By providing the service, the store hoped girls would come to Bonwit’s for the many products they had just learned to need—including makeup applied every day “at least twice, even three times if you can.”

One of the longest chapters in the manual—and the only one that did not contain practical information pertinent to all young girls—was the one about fashion modeling. It began with a lengthy excerpt from a
Seventeen
article by Eileen Ford, of the Ford Model Agency, about “what it takes to join the ranks of today’s top models.” Besides the basics of the model’s life, the excerpt pointed out that, at most, one in one thousand of the girls who applied to Ford became successful models. The manual then asked girls if they felt they met all the requirements to be a professional model. “NO! Perhaps you should do non-professional modeling through your local store’s teen board. However, if the answer is YES, and you do want to go full-steam ahead to a modeling career …”