Thing of Beauty (14 page)

Gia, Maurice and the makeup artist did not wait in the lobby for long: it helped to come in with a friend of the boss. As was true in so many professions, the standard procedures existed to politely process those who
wouldn’t
make it, rather than to identify those who would. When the three Philadelphians were announced, protocol was jettisoned. Maurice’s photographs of Gia had preceded them, and the fact that she was nearly an inch shorter than the Wilhelmina
absolute minimum
of five feet, eight inches had already been discounted. Instead of a pre-interview, Gia was immediately whisked in to meet Wilhelmina. Seated behind a white desk, elegantly smoking a cigarette, the thirty-seven-year-old timeless beauty rose regally to her full five-foot-eleven-inch stature.

“Wilhelmina went absolutely crazy,” recalled Maurice. “She was trying to contain herself. She was saying, ‘Come stand here, my darling,’ and she was really in awe.” And Wilhelmina’s awe
mattered
New York was the richest modeling market in the world, and there were only five agencies in Manhattan that really made a difference—Ford, Wilhelmina, Stewart, Zoli and the recently opened Elite. By almost any standard, Wilhelmina was clearly the agent of the moment. In a tiny business where everyone was a close friend or a close enemy, Wilhelmina was one of the handful of people whose enthusiasm could be
very
contagious.

Willie began to speak excitedly about Gia’s future modeling career as if a deal had already been struck and signed in triplicate. The office was so frothy with expectation that Willie sent Gia home to talk to her parents about the specifics of the contract without actually giving her the document. “We were on our way out when Willie came running down the hall after us with the papers,” Maurice recalled.

Willie also had some nice things to say about Maurice’s
pictures. But her encouragement was clearly more a way to thank him for finding Gia than any comment on his photographic vision. “When they came down and got me, Gia said they had offered her a contract,” Kathleen recalled. “She also said they spent a lot more time talking to her than to Maurice.” It wasn’t long before
that
observation was cattily making its way around the Philadelphia club circuit.

When they got the contract home, Gia and Kathleen went over it with Henry; it was one of the first times that Gia had ever honestly needed something from her stepfather. Like most modeling contracts, it included no financial guarantees whatsoever. There were no signing bonuses, stipends or salaries: there was no health insurance or retirement plan. Models were complete freelancers—the agency simply collected for them and from them. And models got paid only after they generated income for the agency and worked off the upfront costs of being added to the roster: the Wilhelmina-embossed portfolio and datebook, various printing charges, the messenger fees that accumulated rapidly as constantly updated portfolios were circulated. Those charges could be offset only by a fraction of what each modeling assignment generated.

The standard arrangement was that the agency got a commission on each modeling fee. The commission began at twenty percent and was sometimes negotiated downward if the model’s fame rose dramatically—which happened to maybe one in every hundred models with agency contracts. The agency also received a twenty percent fee from the client for making the booking. So, if a model’s fee was $1,500 a day—the absolute top rate at the moment, which perhaps five or ten models in the whole industry could demand—the client paid $1,800 and the model received $1,200. But only the model’s commission, in that case $300, was used to offset her charges.

The agencies felt the high fees and the commission structure were entirely justified—not only by the cachet associated with their names but by the monumental cash flow problems associated with the business. In essence, a modeling agency was little more than a bill collection service and a telephone sales office with a healthy direct mail promotion
budget to get pictures of the models to prospective clients. Most of the glamour accrued from the businesses the company served. Most of the energy emanated from the girls themselves. And most of the money came
through
the agency, not from it.

Almost all the jobs were arranged over the telephone, many at the last minute. A bank of “bookers” sat at phones all day soliciting appointments for beginners and juggling requests for the established names. There was rarely a signed contract before a job was executed, or even a formal billing. Nearly everything was done by verbal handshake—although it was a not-well-kept industry secret that phones in the booking rooms were rigged so the booker could clandestinely record the client repeating and agreeing to the terms.

Models were given vouchers on the set by the client after finishing a job, which they redeemed weekly or biweekly for an agency check. Then the agency had to try to collect the money from the client. To help cover its risk, the agency temporarily deducted an extra fee from the model’s money. But, ultimately, if the payment was late or never came at all, it was the agency’s problem. The industry ran on a great deal of faith—faith that the model would show up and look like she did in the photos the client had seen, faith that the client could and would pay its bills. When faith was violated, the agency was often at the greatest financial risk. So they didn’t throw too much money away on beginners, even promising ones.

Sending Gia to New York was going to require an upfront expense of thousands of dollars. Fortunately, she had recently wrecked her new car, and the insurance company had just paid her father about two thousand dollars to settle the claim. Joe let her have the money even though he had his doubts about Gia moving to New York to become a model. Henry chipped in some as well.

“I never got the right vibes from [my father],” Gia would later tell an interviewer. Part of his concern was that the agency wanted his daughter to drop her family name professionally. Many of the top models went by one name—either their own, or one provided to them by their agent—and Willie had insisted that Gia alone was perfect. It was exotic,
European and short. It was an uncommon name for a model, sure to create curiosity. And it came early in the alphabet. Models often took new names beginning with
A
through
G
so their pictures would appear closer to the front of the alphabetically ordered agency rosters sent to clients.

Gia decided it would be better to move to New York with someone she knew than to live alone. A number of her friends were also thinking about relocating, so she started asking around. Sharon Beverly had recently taken a job at the cosmetics counter at the same Saks Fifth Avenue where Maurice had his shop, so they would sometimes see each other when Gia came to test. For the past several months, they had been doing their best to turn a broken love affair into a friendship. Gia asked Sharon if she wanted to move to New York with her.

Neither of them knew very much about Manhattan: Gia’s interview with Willie had actually been her first time there
ever.
It was such a huge place, New York. Philadelphia had once seemed that big to Gia, but over the years it had grown smaller and smaller. She developed favorite places to eat and shop and dance. She became known in certain establishments. She realized that most of her friends hung out in a handful of places that could be easily combed; nearly everywhere she went, she knew or recognized someone. After a while, she
owned
Philadelphia. But New York seemed scary to Gia—so unfathomable, so difficult to find your way around, especially during its snowiest, coldest winter in forty years.

To begin to get their bearings, Gia and Sharon went up several weekends to scout out the apartment situation. To do this, they had to figure out, basically, how Manhattan was laid out. The sections of town had to be memorized like some school assignment. East Side meant it was east of Fifth Avenue, West was west; uptown was anything above Fifty-ninth (the bottom of Central Park), midtown went down to about Twenty-third and downtown was everything south, getting increasingly
downtown
until you hit Wall Street. Among the areas where they had a
chance
of finding restaurants they could afford, Greenwich Village was downtown on the West Side, Chinatown and Little Italy were way downtown on the East Side. SoHo, the mysterious, dark
district of artists’ lofts and new wave rockers, was somewhere in between, like its budget annex, the East Village.

But no matter how hard they tried to remember sections of town, it was easier to just locate the few essential places in their lives and work backward. Bloomingdale’s was at Fifty-ninth and Third Avenue. Studio 54 was on Fifty-fourth near Sixth Avenue. The center of the Village was around West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. The Wilhelmina agency was at Thirty-seventh and Fifth. Until she and Sharon could find an apartment, Gia would stay at the Barbizon Hotel at Sixty-third and Lexington. And until she figured out the subway, she would just take cabs.

On Wednesday, February 22, 1978, Gia began her first “go-sees.” These were appointments set up by agency bookers during which the model was sent to one address after another to be eyeballed by a testing photographer or, sometimes, an established photographer’s assistant. They looked at you, looked at your book, and either bluntly said they weren’t interested, suggested they would be in touch and gave a time frame, or sometimes even started snapping pictures.

Go-sees were scheduled one an hour, on the hour, sometimes six a day: models called in the night before to get their next day’s schedule. On her first day, Gia’s first appointment, ten
A.M
., asked if she could come back in four weeks. Her second appointment, eleven
A.M
., said he’d call her in two weeks. Her third appointment, noon, had arranged with Wilhelmina bookers to do some test shots of her. He shot for four hours and told her to call back in five days to see the slides.

When she went home for the weekend—to give Sharon a progress report and see her friends at the DCA—Gia had already seen ten different photographers, tested with two of them, and had three others ask her to send more photos. Each photographer had his or her (but usually his) own studio space. Each photographer had his own personal and professional agenda, his own claim to relative fame and his own maze of connections and clients.

Each photographer also had his own range of reputations. At any given moment, there was somebody powerful who
considered him a nobody, another who believed in him as an up-and-comer, still another who revered him as a star and yet another who disdained him as a has-been. But all these photographers had one thing in common. Each had the ability to almost single-handedly launch Gia’s career, either by taking a picture that looked outstanding in her book, or by offering her a job for an assignment he had already been given.

And she was seeing the entire spectrum of photographers. At the high end was Alex Chatelain. The thirty-eight-year-old former assistant to Richard Avedon, Hiro and Guy Bourdin—all fashion photography legends—had just come from Paris to test the U.S. market. He worked for British, French and American
Vogue.
At the low end was Maurice Tannenbaum, whose only real claim to fame was that he had discovered
Gia.
To thank Maurice, Wilhelmina had arranged for him to shoot the girls in the testing division and he was allowed to use the agency’s studios when he was in New York.

In March of 1978, Gia and Sharon Beverly finally moved into their New York apartment—350 East Sixty-second Street, Apt. 3G—and embarked upon their brilliant careers and their just-friendship. The few times they had come to New York together to look for apartments, Sharon had gotten a little too drunk, Gia had been a little too persuasive and things had gotten a little intimate. But that was over, Sharon insisted. She was seeing only men now. She had said the same thing over a year before, but now she meant it. Her new life in New York didn’t include any room for sexual ambiguity: it would be hard enough just finding a good job.

Sharon ended up at the cosmetics counter at Fiorucci’s on Fifty-ninth Street. In the year since its opening, Fiorucci—which imported kitschy, pop-art clothes, accessories and glittery trash, like the $110 gold cowboy boots that were
the
chic footwear statement of 1977—had established itself as one of the handful of New York’s truly trend-setting, or at least trend-selling, stores. The supermarket of high-class camp had a vast selection of things that it seemed like you could
never
find at the mall (although, in reality, there were already seven tiny Fiorucci boutiques sprinkled across the country). Sharing Fiorucci’s moment was the recently
opened vintage clothing warehouse Unique Boutique in the East Village, where Gia shopped for the men’s clothes that dominated her wardrobe. Fiorucci didn’t pay much—still just a percentage on what you could successfully smear on a client’s face and get her to pay for. But it had great cachet. It was the right place at the right time.

Gia just kept going on appointments. There were lots of go-sees, which her agency requested, but people were also beginning to ask to see her specifically. Some of these were “callbacks”: people she had seen who wanted another look. Others were “requests,” generated simply by her circulating portfolio and the buzz that could be manufactured in a world as small as fashion photography when one of the handful of major agencies had a new girl it was excited about. These intermediate appointments were not jobs, or “castings” for jobs, or even tests. But they were a step above go-sees. They meant that someone in the massive beauty–industrial complex knew Gia existed.

Thousands of companies made up the American beauty–industrial complex: some were established giants with huge product lines, others little more than sketchy business plans in search of investors. For Gia, they all had only one thing in common: on any given day, any one of them could give her a job.

At the top of the food chain were the manufacturers: the diverse and diversified makers of clothing, and the chosen few creators of cosmetics and other beauty and health products, each followed by an entourage of subsidiaries and licensees. Then came the sellers of products: the department stores, the specialty clothing stores, the drugstores, the catalog companies, the beauty salons and sometimes even the manufacturer’s company-owned or franchised boutiques. To increase sales there were advertising agencies large and small, national and regional marketing boards (for the finished products or the raw materials used to make them), and in-house advertising departments. They created everything from print and TV ads to countertop “point of purchase” displays.