Thing of Beauty (25 page)

The shot of Gia was to be a “counterpoint to the baby picture, which has no fence. To me, babies are perfect and pure. They have falcon eyes that haven’t yet acquired the filtration for how they perceive the world. The older you get, the more imprisoned you become.”

For Gia’s fenced-in nudes, Von Wangenheim began with fairly tame poses. The shot that would be paired with the baby picture showed Gia covering her pubic area with both hands, her long legs crossed and her eyes glaring into the camera. After a roll or two of poses along these lines, he asked Gia to try jumping up onto the fence and climbing on it.

“The session became amazing,” recalled Sara Foley, who had come to see how the fence she had tracked down was working out. “Gia’s hands were bleeding, they were bleeding from climbing up and down. Chris worked you incredibly hard. There was literally blood coming down her hands. But she loved it too, you see. It was three o’clock in the morning, and they were making amazing pictures.”

But something else was going on as well. Gia had always been prone to crushes, and being in New York around so many beautiful women had just made things worse. “It almost
became a joke,” recalled Sharon Beverly. “One day she came home and she had been working with this makeup artist, a heavyset girl. She said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me, but all the sudden I like fat women.’ I can’t remember the girl’s name, but I remember she had an affair with her—and the girl was straight.”

During the session, Gia realized that she felt something for Sandy Linter—who many in the business considered beautiful enough to model herself. Sandy and Gia had worked together before. But there was just something about the whole scene that made Gia take her own emotional pulse again.

“Years later, she could still talk about this session in such detail,” recalled one friend. “She told me about the fence, and there was loud music playing and they had asked her to do these nudes. And she was up against the fence and I think she said Sandy was on the fence too, on the other side. And she said, ‘I looked at her and I just fell crazy in love with her. I was listening to this music, and the more I’d jump on the fence the more excited I’d get’ It was like she kept jumping up there, nude, to impress Sandy, to turn her on.

“She thought Sandy was straight. She said Sandy had this look—she always wore real frilly things, and spandex tights, stuff like that. She said she didn’t tell Sandy about how she felt then, she didn’t make a pass at her.”

That weekend, Gia decided to go on a diet. She scribbled the word “list” at the top of a datebook page and then wrote down all the things she needed: an enema bag, various juices, teas and vitamins, as well as a variety of fruits and vegetables, everything from turnips to black currants. She committed to taking long walks, hot and cold showers, regular enemas and regular trips to the spa.

Except for the enemas, this regimen was considered the New Age, healthier approach to weight control—very Way Bandy—especially when compared to the more traditional, more extreme route that models often took: diet pills and fasting. If Gia wanted a role model for these old-fashioned methods of weight control, she didn’t have to look any farther than Wilhelmina Cooper. Willie had been blessed with
marvelously long legs and arms, and a neck and head elongated like an El Greco painting—they disguised her midsection, which expanded and contracted with her weight. She had learned to rely upon diet pills as a model, and her tricks were passed on to the girls she taught. Willie did believe in starvation diets, too: it hadn’t been a complete lie when she wrote in her recent how-to book
The New You
that the key to her weight control was her “Hummingbird Diet.” But she also believed in pills—especially to help girls get ready for bathing suit shoots, which could come at any time.

While most women looked forward, often with dread, to one bathing suit season a year, a model could have bathing suit season sneak up at almost any time. Depending on lead times, magazines shot two to six months in advance and showed bathing suits in the spring and summer, and often again in the winter for “cruisewear” collections. Catalog swimwear shots could come any time of the year when a tropical location had sun. And then there was always a mad rush to lose weight.

“I especially remember Patti Hansen with this,” said Sara Foley. “Patti was always one of those people you had to say to the agency, ‘Look, this is a bathing suit trip,
please
ask her to stop drinking beer for a week before,
really
.’”

“If somebody had to lose weight fast, Willie wouldn’t think anything of giving them black beauties or whatever she had,” recalled Kay Mitchell. “But, then, that was the time frame when everybody was very casual about such things, you know? And Willie—well, let’s just say I learned a lot about deprivation from just being around her. You deprive yourself of everything, and then go off the wagon. She would want forty sandwiches and a pizza and then we’d be on diets again.”

Taking a cue from her models, Kay Mitchell, who was heavyset, tried the Dr. Feelgood of the moment. “Willie sent me to this one doctor,” she recalled, “and he dished intravenous amphetamine and I had no idea in the world what I was doing … maybe it was B-12 shots or something, but it was
like
intravenous amphetamine. At six o’clock in the morning, there would be a whole lobby full of people waiting to go in and get their injections. It was
a lot
of money per shot. I was making $120 a week as a receptionist
and it was $30 a shot or something and you were supposed to go three times a week. Obviously, I’m going to get behind in my payments. It got to the point that that’s what the girls would do for presents for me, pay my diet doctor bills. I would show up to pay and the nurse would say, ‘Oh no, that was taken care of by so and so.’”

It would be a few days before Gia decided how to make her move on Sandy. She had just bought a $10,000 red Fiat Spider convertible—an odd choice for a first indulgence in the modeling world. The girls usually blew their first big checks on jewelry or clothes; since they lived in Manhattan and were rarely home anyway, the last thing they would consider owning was a car. But Gia was a suburban girl at heart, and a love of fast cars was in her blood. Her mother, in fact, had just received a Corvette from her stepfather. With her nest now empty, Kathleen had turned some of her attention to learning about performance cars and shopping for the perfect gold 1978.

Gia guessed that if she called Sandy up and offered her a ride in her new car, she would accept just out of curiosity. She did. “Gia told me she took her for a ride,” a friend recalled. “She said they came back to the apartment and Gia seduced her.”

Another friend remembered the story differently. “Gia told me that they were high and that Sandy thought that Gia was a little boy,” she recalled. “So afterwards Sandy was, like, flipped out about it—that Gia wasn’t a boy, you know? But they continued some relationship, although I think it was more Gia being infatuated with her and Sandy being flipped out about it.”

Relationships among fashion people were rarely conventional. The marriages and really strong relationships were constantly tested by the incessant travel and the never-ending stream of young boys and girls willing to do anything to succeed. The fledgling relationships, and even the aggressive flirtations, were immediately blown out of proportion by the industry gossip circuit.

At some level, the entire industry was built on a shifting foundation of people falling in and out of love with each other, both personally and professionally. Just as voters in
Chicago were jokingly admonished to “vote early and often,” so fashion people were supposed to fall in love. It had always been an occupational hazard in fashion—perhaps because it was one of the first industries to employ men and women of all sexes side by side. Or maybe it was just because every interaction required a certain flattery and flirtation. Almost every decision was made emotionally, and the chances of an “office romance” increased when people worked in so many different offices. Every photo session was a sort of simulated one-night stand: it was denying the law of averages to set off that many sparks and never expect to light any fires. Unfortunately, the best part of many of the relationships was what was captured on film and used to sell the product. Even the ugly end of a relationship could lead to a creative tension that made for strong pictures. There often wasn’t much left for the participants to take home.

In the fashion business, the wide-open sexuality of the late seventies only further bent the already lax rules about relationships. There had also been an unprecedented influx of young, pretty people wanting to find a place in the glamorous professions of glamour. “It was the beginning of the Kleenex generation,” recalled hairstylist Harry King, “when the business knew it could just use people up, especially models, and throw them away.”

So the fact that Gia had set her sights on Sandy Linter—and some believed they had even gone to bed together—didn’t necessarily mean that much. What it meant was that pretty soon people in the business would start picking up on the fact that something was going on between them. The industry was already abnormally interested in Gia’s private life because she was a rising star and had been relatively public about her interest in women—even though she was also seeing men.

Although fashion had long been one of the few safe havens for openly gay men, a gay or bisexual woman was still titillating. Much attention had been paid to designer/princess Diane von Furstenberg’s contention—in a 1973
New York
magazine cover story—that she and her husband Egon, the magazine’s “couple of the year,” had invited another woman into their bed. When profiled in
Women’s Wear Daily
in
July, 1978, Von Furstenberg was asked directly to comment on rumors that she was a lesbian: the article was titled “I Live Like a Man.” Gay men were provocative only to other gay men. Gay women, apparently, were provocative to everyone
but
gay men—but not in a way that made it easy to live openly as a lesbian. Gia had once accepted a dinner invitation in New York from a man who took her to a fancy restaurant. When she told him she preferred women and had no interest in him, he got up and walked out, leaving her with the check.

Whatever the extent of their relationship, Gia and Sandy Linter would soon become linked in the eyes of their peers. But not only because of any romantic involvement. In reality, fashion people’s personal lives were considered secondary to their work. Because personality clashes could be so devastating on the set—costing time and, as everyone’s rates kept rising, big money—photographers and editors were constantly looking for talented people who could be consistently
teamed.
A hair-and-makeup duo like Way Bandy and Harry King. Two models who liked working together and didn’t try to constantly upstage each other, like Patti Hansen and Shaun Casey. A photographer and model who were involved, like Mike Reinhardt and Janice Dickinson. And a consummate professional makeup artist who might help assure that her pal showed up on time for sessions.

The week before Thanksgiving, Gia took a short work trip to California. Chris von Wangenheim had been assigned to photograph the eveningwear from the New York collections. The twice-yearly agglomeration of American “designer ready-to-wear” shows was making an international splash because of the rise of designers like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis, and because jet-setters and foreign fashion folk wanted an excuse to see Studio 54 Manhattan for themselves. Von Wangenheim had conspired with
Vogue
fashion editor Jade Hobson to pack the clothes into the large, black “coffins” used for transport and take them on a little trip to Palm Springs. The shooting wouldn’t be in a fancy hotel or a rich person’s home, but in the middle of the flat, hard desert in the nearby Luzerne Valley. To take advantage of the variously wonderful effects of the desert
sun, they shot during all the available daylight. To get to the location, they had to fly in helicopters, which Von Wangenheim would eventually incorporate into the pictures as well.

“God, I remember waking up at four or four-thirty each morning,” recalled hairstylist John Sahag. He had, at the time, just relocated to New York from Paris to cash in on his professional reputation—helped along by his appearance as the stylist in the thriller
Eyes of Laura Mars.
“We had to fly up over the hills to get to the site. This guy had a helicopter, he used it the way you park your car in the garage. We’d be out there at five o’clock, so cold we were all wearing furs. By midday, we were all half-naked.”

Over the next four days, the alternately freezing and perspiring crew executed a portfolio of shots that would become instant classics when they appeared in the February 1979 issue of American
Vogue.
One in particular, an overhead shot of Gia and the other two models shielding their eyes from the wind of the helicopter—which is visible only in shadow—would be collected in most of the major books on commercial photography in the seventies. The others were merely sensational studies of color and shadow, among them an opener of Gia luxuriating in the back seat of a Cadillac convertible, and a shot of Gia in a black slip-dress holding a glass of champagne, the shadows from her long legs seemingly stretching for miles.

After the shootings she returned to New York and immediately shifted gears, driving down to Bucks County to spend Thanksgiving weekend with her mother. It was the first time she had been home in several months. Although she kept in constant touch with her mother by phone—Kathleen even came to visit occasionally—she was much less actively involved with her other family and friends. Gia was good at
being there
, at making an impression during the time she spent with someone: when she was away, she was gone. Her brothers, her Aunt Nancy, her old pals from the DCA weren’t forgotten, but they were gone. She spoke to them on the phone, sent a postcard from somewhere when she thought of it, but like a family member away at college, Gia
was seen mostly at holidays—except for her appearances in major monthly magazines.