Thing of Beauty (11 page)

Harris regarded the in-store course as a mere trifle compared to the intensive modeling sessions she gave several nights a week in the grand ballroom at the Bellevue Stratford hotel. There, the girls with even the slightest bit of promise would be painstakingly trained in actual modeling techniques. Harris paid special attention to walking: it had been considered her great talent as a runway girl, and was a skill she felt that even many top models had failed to master. She couldn’t stand it when Bonwit’s would bring a top girl down from New York for a big show and the girl
couldn’t even
walk
properly; it was better to use a local girl who had been properly trained.

Harris’ course was meant to turn out models—or at least good “nonprofessional models.” And she did differentiate between girls who “had something” and those who had nothing but enough money to pay the fee. That distinction separated her from the local franchise of the national John Robert Powers schools, which had been spun off from New York’s first-ever model agency. Begun in the thirties and, for years, so synonymous with the profession that it spawned the 1942 film comedy
The Powers Girl
with George Murphy and Dermis Day, the Powers agency itself had been toppled by Eileen Ford in the fifties. But its schools lived on, surviving by adopting a new creed: If you didn’t have the looks to be a model, you could at least learn to be a “model girl.”

A “model girl” knew the basics of Good Grooming: her face shape, her body type, the hues that best suited her, professional makeup techniques and how to achieve that “well-put-together look.” She understood the building blocks of Visual Poise: proper placement of hands and feet, how to enter and exit a room (both the informal three-touch method and the formal four-touch method, each including a hesitation for effect). And she minded her many Manners, like the rules of Cigarette Etiquette: “Avoid looking masculine, never dangle the cigarette in your mouth, never flick ashes man-style, always use a feminine cigarette case and lighter.” Powers was sort of a charm school for girls who would have to get real jobs eventually.

Gia’s Aunt Nancy also signed up for Jane Harris’s course. Gia still looked up to her aunt in some ways, but many of her new friends were Nancy’s age or older, so the two had effectively become peers. There was also such a strong family resemblance between them that they looked like sisters—although Nancy was pretty in a more conventional, less ethnic way, and she wore all the feminine clothing and makeup that Gia rejected.

Nancy led Jane Harris to believe that she was signing up for the course as a favor to Gia, whom she sort of watched over. She explained to Harris that Gia was the way she was—distant, generally uncommunicative—because she came from a broken home and had some drug problems.
While there was some truth to this, Nancy was hardly taking the course just to look out for her niece. She hoped that there might be a place for her in modeling. Nancy had never vigorously pursued it. She was working as a bank teller, filling in at Hoagie City. And she was, at twenty-one, already a little old to
begin
modeling. But people had always told Nancy that she was the prettiest of the Adams sisters. And she looked like a model. It was something to dream about. It was certainly something she dreamed about more than Gia ever did.

Jane Harris found Gia difficult to talk with, but she was taken by her looks and her ability to coordinate clothes. “There was an innate sense you felt,” she recalled, “this girl was so put together, without being contrived. I don’t know if the clothes were expensive, but she
looked fashion.
And she did well in the course. She learned to walk
beautifully.

“I wanted her to go to Eileen Ford after she was done with me. But she disappeared off the face of the earth. I remember her class well because we held graduation at the Bellevue and that was the summer of Legionnaires’ disease.”

Besides the runway classes, Gia also answered an ad in the paper for amateur models at Gimbels department store. “We had always used regular models, and then somebody decided we should try ten-dollar-an-hour models and just have a cattle call,” recalled well-known Philadelphia photographer Michael Ahearn, who was then director of fashion photography for the store. “Most of the people were just awful, and then in comes this little girl and she was
wonderful.
She was always late, always had some excuse. The fashion director used to get pissed and wanted to shoot without her. And she sometimes came in bruised up. She said that her stepfather did it because she was running around late. We had to patch up the bruises. But I used her as much as I could, even when she wasn’t really right for the shots. I remember stuffing up her chest and behind the straps in the back so we could use her for these ads for old ladies’ bras.

“She had a way of looking at you at certain times. It was this look, the face of a little girl. She learned how to drop it for the camera, but sometimes I would still see it.”

Joe Petrellis also did another series of tests with her: this
time, in more sophisticated poses and clothes, including a purple see-through blouse with nothing underneath. “She projected like a cheetah,” he recalled. “She was
born
to be in front of the camera. The way she would move … she knew her face, she knew her body. She was born with that. She was born to model. And it was no big deal to her. She was only doing modeling because she needed something to do.”

Petrellis also suggested that Gia go see Paul Midiri, who ran the top modeling agency in Philadelphia. She went with her mother, who did most of the talking, and Midiri put her in his teen division. But nothing happened. “She didn’t get one booking with us,” said Midiri. “The trend toward using younger models and making them look older hadn’t yet caught on in Philadelphia. She had a mildly ethnic and exotic look, which Philadelphia just wasn’t that familiar with. She was also a little rough around the edges. In New York, you can get away with that because there are makeup artists at the shootings. In Philadelphia, you’re expected to be more of a complete package.”

As she did more modeling, Gia started paying more attention to the names in the credits in the fashion magazines her mother got. In her journals, along with the rock lyrics, she would errantly jot down the name of a photographer or a designer or a model she had noticed: itineraries of imaginary modeling trips and technical information she gleaned from photographers soon followed.

“We would sit in Gia’s bedroom,” recalled Nancy Adams, “and try on clothes, putting ultrasuede outfits together to be fashionable. Patti Hansen was on the cover of
Vogue
for, like, five months in a row. Gia said all she wanted to do was one cover of
Vogue:
that was it, just one cover.”

After their classes with Jane Harris, Gia and Nancy sometimes walked
like ladies
to the clubs, many of which were only a few blocks from the Bellevue. They often went to a women-only bar, because that’s where Gia said she felt the most relaxed.

“I loved to go out with Gia and Nancy,” remembered Joanne Grossman. “You could sit at the bar and have every single decent-looking person in the room come over. Gia never moved, and Nancy just kept everyone at bay. I used
to just love to sit on a bar stool and watch this: it was a night in itself. And you never had to pay for a drink.

“Gia just had this charisma. She wasn’t extremely smart and she didn’t have extremely interesting things to talk about, which bothered her. She thought of herself as sexually boring, too. She used to say, ‘People look at me and they think I’m this beautiful thing and I must be extremely hot. And what they don’t realize is that I’m extremely boring…’

“Nancy played around. I was involved with her on and off for many years and I finally had to accept it: she was straight. She just loved people in different ways. I wouldn’t even say she was clearly bisexual. Just because you have one or two people who come into your life and you’re sexual with them doesn’t mean that you’re gay.”

The biggest, newest club in town was the DCA—or, as Gia and her friends referred to it, the “DCGay.” It was a cavernous building hidden from plain sight on a small, pedestrian-only street. The main floor was devoted to the kind of flamboyant, multimedia disco scene that a new generation of gay men were coming to favor. But DCA was large enough to have a separate floor just for women.

“Oh, it was a scene up there on the second floor,” recalled Toni O’Connor. “We all lived in our own little world, nobody else could get in, we could do whatever we wanted. One night I can remember at the club, Gia had this water pistol and we were in the ladies’ bathroom taking pictures of each other and shooting the gun. She was just posing with the gun. We had such a good time. Sometimes we would all dress in three-piece suits. We were like the gay Mafia.”

“I remember one night at the DCA,” said Roseanne Rubino, “Ronnie showed up with his new boyfriend. We were all very fucked up: I was hanging with a new bunch of weirds then. Gia was there. Gia was
always
there. When we walked into the place, we would immediately go get a drink: Southern Comfort Manhattans were the big thing. Somebody had Quaaludes, we were all dancing. I had this, like, white thing on—white shirt and pants. All I know is that I woke up on the men’s room floor and it was about four
A.M
. and the place was closing. Ronnie and his boyfriend took me home.

“Gia always amazed me during that DCA time, because we would go out and get trashed and all sleep over at somebody’s
house, and we’d wake up the next afternoon and we all looked a mess. Except Gia, who looked gorgeous. She didn’t have to do a thing. She looked great. She could eat whatever she wanted to, never had to diet. It was like, ‘Oh man,
fuck you
, you always look perfect.’”

It was at DCA that Gia met twenty-one-year-old Sharon Beverly*. A small, energetic woman with blond hair, almond eyes and a friendly smirk, Sharon worked at a department store makeup counter. She had always been overshadowed in town by her older brother Stevie, who was well-known (if not always well thought of) in the clubs, and had dated Gia himself. When friends debated if Gia was “really gay,” the purported fact that she had slept with Stevie was often invoked. But it was Gia and Sharon who dated on-and-off for a year and then finally became involved.

“The first time I was with her was at her mother’s apartment,” recalled Sharon, with a giggle. “I was dressing to leave the next morning and she was sitting on the floor in this terry cloth robe she wore, saying, ‘Don’t leave, stay with me.’ I realized immediately how needy she was, and how far I had already fallen for her.

“Gia and I kind of revolutionized the gay world in Philadelphia. Before we went out together it was always butch-fem couples where there was one ‘masculine’ and one ‘feminine’ girl. We were seen as two fems. I mean, really, Gia was butch, she dressed like a boy. But she wasn’t the kind of butch that Philadelphia girls were—muscular, big. To them, Gia was a fem, because of her aesthetics. We were, I think, pretty much a shock to them.

“And they were pretty boring to us. That’s why we always went downstairs and danced with the boys. The boys were more fun, they were out there dancing and knew how to have a good time. And the girls were sitting upstairs crying in their drinks.”

At first, Kathleen seemed to like Gia’s new friend Sharon—until she figured out that they were involved. Then she called Sharon’s mother. “She told my mom that she thought I was too old to be hanging around with her daughter,” Sharon said. “She didn’t say we were sleeping together,
but my parents already knew I was gay. They had received a letter from some other girl’s parents.”

Sharon had no doubts about her own sexual preferences at that time—she had been seeing only women for over five years—but she felt that Gia was still vacillating. “Gia
always
had a question about her sexual preference,” Sharon said. “There was always a question in her mind, and she always
wished
she loved men—it would have made life so much less complicated. But she just always really loved women. And she was a lot of fun, very mischievous and she had a lot of energy. She really loved to wrestle. We would have wrestling matches: she was pretty strong, but I’m strong, too. Wrestling made her happy. It brought her out of her depressions.”

It was immediately clear to Sharon that Gia had no emotional middle. “She was an extremist, and she found emotions traumatically hard to deal with,” Sharon said. “There was a very sad side of her. It wasn’t a sadness that was really blatant—she was always in a good mood, always laughing, joking—but it was there. She always questioned why she would get upset. She felt that she had a very rough life and felt that it took a lot of energy to deal with the world as it was. She could never pinpoint where the unhappiness came from, just something inside of her that she could never satisfy. I don’t think she was talking about her parents. I don’t even think she meant anything that
tangible
was rough. She just meant living and thinking and breathing and having to mentally deal with waking up and living was a hard thing for her.”

By the end of her junior year in high school—which came officially at the end of summer school, 1976—Gia had moved back and forth between her parents’ homes several more times, living wherever she was in the least amount of trouble. In her journals, she would sometimes make lists of the pros and cons of living with one parent or the other: “Living with Mom & Henry—own room, far away, pool, dinner, behave.”

She was now also completely mobile because her father had bought her a new car. “When she turned sixteen, he bought her a car, a ‘76 Capri, just like that,” said Henry
Sperr. “I didn’t think any kid should be given a car. I thought she should have to work for it.”

While Kathleen wasn’t thrilled about Gia’s newfound freedom, she was quietly proud of how aggressively her daughter drove. A car enthusiast herself, Kathleen believed that strong women should know how to handle cars. “Gia could drive a car better than any guy,” she recalled. “She was an absolute daredevil behind the wheel.”