Thing of Beauty (12 page)

Sharon Beverly once got a glimpse of Gia’s road acumen. “One day I was really mad at her because I found her at my house down in the basement fooling around with my brother,” she recalled. “She snuck upstairs, past my parents, to come apologize, but I wouldn’t talk to her: I just got dressed, walked out, and drove away. So I’m going down East River Drive and suddenly she pulls up beside me in the other lane. She’s screaming, ‘I love you, I love you!’ I pulled away and no matter how fast I drove, every time I stopped she pulled up right next to me.”

Once Gia had a car, there seemed to be no chance of reining her in. Kathleen and Joe were so resigned to their inability to exert parental authority that they agreed to a plan that was clearly post-last resort, but somehow seemed rational given all the irrational things that had happened. After she finished her junior year in summer school, Gia proposed that she start her senior year fresh, in a new school and new surroundings. She asked if she could move permanently into Center City—where she spent much of her time anyway—and attend South Philadelphia High School. She could live in the apartment above Hoagie City, where her father rarely stayed anymore and which her brother Michael, just out of high school himself, had commandeered. It was a two-bedroom place with windows overlooking Chestnut Street, which was completely deserted except for buses after business hours. The living room was dominated by a slate pool table, on which Gia was becoming quite accomplished. “Gia could play pool like a man,” recalled her uncle Dan Carangi. “She had a slide stroke just like a guy.”

Gia was given permission to move into Center City. She knew hardly anyone at her new school, and barely kept her head above water academically. Her life was so unlike that
of a normal teenager that it sometimes seemed pointless to even pretend to play the game.

One of the people who helped her struggle toward graduating was John Long, a twenty-seven-year-old jack-of-some-trades. A struggling painter, martial artist, concert promoter and slightly self-amazed Renaissance guy, Long had taken Gia under his wing several years before and got in the habit of helping her with her homework when she bothered to do it.

“When I first met her, she told me she was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania,” he recalled. “Later I found out that just about everything else she had said was a lie, too. She had fabricated an entire life. I never figured out why. I got to know her mother and stepfather a little bit. Hank seemed like a bright guy, but he stayed out of it. After all, he just wanted to marry Kathleen and instead he got all the problems of her juvenile delinquent daughter in the bargain. Kathleen was just trying to make her marriage work and Gia wasn’t any help. I mean, Kathleen was more tolerant than
any
parent should be in trying to hold on to her kid’s love. And Gia learned very early what she could get away with. When you have people around who you can tell ‘Jump backwards through a hoop of fire,’ and they do it, pretty soon you find yourself becoming a really overbearing bastard. And then you have to make a conscious decision to be
less
abusive.”

One of the many things John Long knew a little bit about was fashion photography. When he had first seen Gia in Hoagie City, he asked if she had done any modeling and offered some advice. But while she didn’t seem interested in his counsel on fashion, Gia was happy to have him as a big brother for other reasons. He had great connections with all the promoters in town so he could get good concert tickets. And he was a convenient heterosexual front. She could make it appear to her family—and anyone else—that John Long might be her boyfriend. But quite the contrary was true. Mostly, she was using him to meet other women, or to run interference with her cast-off one-night stands.

“I remember one time I got a phone call from this girl,” said Long. “She’s crying and she’s saying, ‘I know you’re having an affair with Gia, but what you don’t know is that
she’s only fifteen years old and she’s gonna blackmail you.’ To break up with the girl, Gia had told her she was romantically involved with me.”

After moving into Center City, Gia’s social and sex lives became even more complicated—especially after she and Sharon uncoupled. They had always had the kind of relationship that went from crisis to crisis, breakup to makeup, over the silliest things imaginable. But when they finally split for good, it was over a much more serious issue. Sharon had decided to “go straight.” She came to believe that her involvement with women—Gia and those before—had been mostly a reaction against men.

“I think that I had a lot of anger inside for men because, besides being raped, I was also sexually abused by someone when I was very young, and that went on for about a year,” Sharon recalled. “I think that’s one big reason that it happened that I turned to women, ‘cause I felt much safer with them. I guess, looking back, that it was somehow a phase. I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but I guess it was a phase because it’s over and it’s been over for a long time.”

Gia was crushed by Sharon’s decision. It was a terrible personal loss, the kind that Gia was never very good at handling. She wrote in her journal, “When she kisses me I feel all four winds blow at my face/But now Sharon tell me what do you do with a woman who has no love for you/my love for her shall never die for she opens my eyes/she is my lost captive and no longer lies along my legs.”

After the breakup, Gia used her unwanted freedom to get involved with all kinds of women. “Gia liked to play games with women, she liked the challenge,” recalled David Cohen, another DCA regular. “She could be a great seductress, sending flowers and really wooing girls. Or sometimes she would just get horny, bring some chick home and throw her out the next morning.”

In Center City, it was not uncommon for late weekend nights to end the next morning at any one of the dozen or so twenty-four-hour diners. The most legendary of them, the Melrose Diner, was too deep in South Philadelphia to walk to from the clubs. So people usually ended up in the Greekowned places that seemed to pop up wherever life was being
lived twenty-four hours a day—near a hospital, a hotel, a bunch of clubs or a gay cruising area.

“There was a diner right around the corner from her dad’s apartment,” recalled Nancy Adams, “where Gia used to take all her dates for breakfast the next morning, if there was a next morning. Either way, I would meet her there for lunch, or at the hoagie shop, and she would, like, critique her dates. If I had seen who she was with, she’d ask what I thought of her. Or she’d say, ‘Well, I think she’s really dumb, but she’s really cute.’ The funny thing was, I think she took her relationships very seriously and she took sex very seriously. It was just … people were in a frenzy to have sex then. That was the whole outcome of a night. Going out, doing drugs, getting really wacko and picking someone up.”

“Gia just fell in love easily and when she had a crush, it was a very passionate crush,” recalled Sharon Beverly. “And she didn’t take sleeping with women lightly. She took sleeping with
men
lightly, but not sleeping with women. I mean, it wasn’t as if she’d sleep with someone one night and then go on to the next. I mean, I know she
did
that. But it was basically looking for more of a relationship.

“But, you know, that was a bad time to fall in love with the people you slept with. People weren’t really looking for love. Although, no, wait. I take that back. In the back of their minds they were looking for it, but in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. You know, looking for it by sleeping with three people each week thinking one of them might be the one. You know what I mean? Even through their promiscuity there was, like, a
goal
to it.”

I
t was time for Mr. Maurice to reinvent himself again.

The first time had come when he was fifteen and still Maurice Tannenbaum, a neighborhood kid who had given haircuts door-to-door for a quarter and then learned how to style in a little basement salon below the busy intersection of Bustleton and Tyson in the Northeast. He found he had an instinct for hair and, just as important, an understanding of the power of saying “fabulous” convincingly—an ability to make women feel good, or at least better, about themselves on a weekly basis. At sixteen, he was reported for working without a license by the owner of a competing shop, who wanted to steal him away and used his position on the state licensing board to do just that. Eventually Maurice outgrew that second shop, and then another, and ended up on the Main Line, working at a well-known shop and then opening one of his own with a partner. When that partnership failed, he opted for some stability—he had a wife and a child—and in 1969 took a job as director of the salon at the newly opened Saks Fifth Avenue store in Bala Cynwyd, just outside the city limits.

It was at Saks that he had come to be known as Mr. Maurice—at first jokingly but then, as his fame grew, a little more seriously. He had gone from well-known hairdresser
to the most celebrated and expensive stylist in town by perfecting the new “layering” technique made popular by Jane Fonda’s radical chic coif. “He studied that hairdo with the intellectual detachment of a scientist,” one of his devotees told
Philadelphia
magazine in a 1972 article about the new hairstylist superstars. “In the end, he was the only one in Philadelphia who really understood it.”

With his stardom came several life changes. He got involved with a woman who worked in his salon and he divorced his wife. Then, in a sort of bisexual version of the just-released film
Shampoo
, he got involved with a man who worked in his salon and divorced his sexual preference. By 1977, he was ready to divorce Philadelphia, too.

Maurice wanted to move to New York, where he often went on weekends and where some of his clients had already migrated. But he hoped to relocate as somebody more interesting than just a
hairdresser.
Being a top stylist in New York wouldn’t be that much better than being
the
master cutter in Philadelphia. Certainly, it would
be
New York. The rich people there would be richer, the celebrities more celebrated, the fast lane faster and the gay life gayer. Salons depended on a handful of clients who would go to any expense to make sure they looked their best: only in New York did any expense really mean
any
expense. Since the magazines and manufacturers were based in Manhattan, there would be fashion photography and fashion show hair work, which often involved exotic trips and led to exotic friendships.

But Maurice had met enough of the “name” stylists in his travels—like Harry King in New York, Jean Louis David in Paris and Michael Rasser in London—to understand how the high-fashion business really worked. Cutting models’ hair didn’t pay very much in itself: the day rate was often less than what he grossed daily in his Philadelphia salon. The work wasn’t always very creative: you were generally hired by the photographer, who often told you what to do just like the ladies in the salon. Basically, you cut models’ hair cheap for the magazine credits—and cut some celebrities’ hair free for the word-of-mouth—in order to get your name around, fill your salon with less glamorous but full-paying heads and perhaps snag a promotion deal with the
manufacturer of some hair-care line. Most of the big money was generated through the salon where you worked. And since Maurice, like many top stylists, was far better at the cut-and-shtick than at running a business, he would undoubtedly end up as a star in someone else’s shop, losing up to fifty percent of the income he generated to the owner.

And it still wasn’t art or anything. It was just haircuts.

“Women were demanding, they were tiresome,” Maurice recalled. “I had reached the pinnacle of what I could be in Philadelphia. I was thirty-two years old. I wanted adventure. I wanted to travel. And then I found photography. It seemed uncompromising.”

He had hired enough photographers to shoot his hairstyles that he understood what was involved. He didn’t think photography looked
easy
, but it looked like something he could learn. And, more important, it seemed like photographers had so much more control over their lives than hairstylists did. Photographers were respected, indulged, even worshiped. They didn’t suck up to people for a living, people sucked up to them. Photographers were the centers of their own little universes: models, hair and makeup people, and stylists orbited around them, always at the mercy of their selective gravitational pull.

Maurice knew that untried photographers, no matter how great their connections were in the business, didn’t just walk in and get paid to take pictures. He would have to create a “body of work”—a bunch of pictures—that showed his ability to bring something singular to photographs that still looked like they could sell something. He would then have to put this body of work into a portfolio, which he would properly refer to as a “book.” Fledgling still-life photographers and photojournalists could develop a body of work largely on their own. Would-be fashion photographers, like aspiring playwrights, needed a cast to play the other roles in these nonprofit theatrical ventures. In fashion photography, there was a name for these continual dress rehearsals for pictorial plays unlikely to ever be premiered. They were called “tests.”

The test was, and always would be, the essential process in the fashion photography business. It was the intermediate
step between dreamy amateurhood and possible professionalism for photographers, models, hairdressers, makeup artists and the new breed of visual professionals known as “artistic directors” or simply as “stylists,” who claimed responsibility for “bringing the whole thing together.” The test was passed if any one image among the dozens or hundreds or even thousands produced caught the eye of someone who mattered—an agent, an art director, the friend of an editor’s brother-in-law—and convinced that person that
somebody
involved in the shot knew what they were doing. The finished pictures could result in almost any cast member being singled out—one good picture might show up in a half-dozen books. But, the test was the photographer’s show to direct and produce and, in most cases, fund: with film and processing charges, working “for free” generally cost the photographer more than everyone else combined.