Thing of Beauty (26 page)

The course of her career was being charted by the folks back home. The women, who had grown up reading the fashion magazines, realized just how big she had become and lived vicariously through her. The men, to whom women’s magazines were largely baffling, quantified her success in dollar terms and uneasily admitted how provocative some of Gia’s pictures were.

Gia brought her pal John Long to Thanksgiving dinner with her, and had him pretend he was her boyfriend in New York. It was easier around her mother and brothers to concentrate on the possibly heterosexual aspects of her life in the business. She was, for example, getting a lot of laughs with her stories about The Prince. By this time in the retelling, he was threatening to kill himself if she didn’t marry him.

Two weeks later Gia was off again. This time it was to London, for a week shooting with British
Vogue
, which had quietly become perhaps the most visually interesting of the
Vogues.
Its recent success was generally attributed to former model Grace Coddington, who had become Britain’s hottest fashion editor.

One of the beneficiaries of Coddington’s rise was photographer Alex Chatelain, who did a lot of shooting for the magazine and, because he was based in New York—where British
Vogue
rarely shot—served as one of the publication’s roving eyes for the new American models. Chatelain had been one of the first photographers to work with model Esme Marshall, dubbed “the energy girl” by
Mademoiselle
and offered up as an athletic, short-haired, bushy-browed role model to that magazine’s younger readership. Chatelain had also been the first major photographer to see Gia, although he hadn’t been able to book her for anything big until this London trip. They had done one small American
Vogue
shooting in his New York studio, but this was a big assignment: fourteen to sixteen color pages and probably a cover.

Chatelain did not really care for Gia personally. But he knew she was the right New York model to deliver to British
Vogue.
And he knew that, whatever her attitude problems, she was a natural in front of the camera.

“She was already weird on that trip,” he recalled, “already disappearing, already falling asleep, all these things people do when they’re taking drugs. But she had some kind of a real presence, very strong. People say she was really beautiful, I can’t say that. She didn’t have a great body, didn’t have great elegance intrinsically. But then something came through in the pictures. It was like Marilyn Monroe. If you looked at her unsentimentally, Marilyn didn’t have a great body at the end, but when she moved or when she … I don’t know, but Gia had that same pathetic thing that Marilyn had.

“But then, I think the way I’ve always reacted to girls is that I never know what’s going on with them and I’m not really interested. It’s just, instinctively, whether it works or not. With her, at times she annoyed me, because she was late or she was falling asleep. But I never thought of it, because then, in the picture, even without my noticing it—something was there.”

Chatelain never wondered about the process of “something” turning up there until years later, when his confidence started to fade. “I guess a bigger part of it than I realized at the time was just getting swept up in the moment,” he said. “I can now see that if you give a person a chance, he’ll make good pictures. When I was with British
Vogue
, I got a chance to make good pictures. I had the best models, best hair, best makeup, best editors. You can’t miss. You have to be a total asshole to
not
succeed. I look at Patrick Demarchelier. I don’t think he’s a great photographer, but he’s very smart about his business and he does it well. He’s being given a chance, every day, to do good pictures. So he comes out with good pictures.”

The day after Gia returned from London was, as she marked in her datebook, “Mommy’s Birthday.” Even though she had too much work to visit Kathleen, she wanted to spoil her in the way of the fashion industry. She arranged to have flowers and champagne delivered to her.

Manhattan florists loved models and agency people, because they had made saying it with flowers their industry
standard. It was not uncommon for models to send extravagant floral arrangements to their bookers, their agents or anyone they perceived as having done them a favor; nor was it uncommon for agents and photographers to send models flowers at their apartments, or even at a shooting. Almost everyone important in the business could be counted on to have some recently delivered flowers on his or her office desk or living room coffee table, and perhaps the remains of a not-so-recently-delivered arrangement as well.

Gia had always loved flowers, so she was happy to jump on the bud bandwagon. “Gia loved roses,” Kathleen recalled, “and when she became a model and had all this money to spend, she sent $50-a-dozen roses like it was nothing. She brought me an orchid one time she bought with Scavullo. Her color was yellow, my color was apricot. I still can’t see a yellow rose without thinking of her.”

While Gia was in London, Studio 54 was raided. The Organized Crime Strike Force of the U.S. Attorney’s office, seeking evidence to help them put down the disco-caine mutiny, recovered about an ounce of coke and a double set of books allegedly used to defraud the IRS. They also reportedly found a detailed list of the club’s celebrity customers, cross-referenced with the drugs and other party favors purchased to insure that they remained celebrity customers.

For some, the raid came as a sign that the party was waning, that Studio (which reopened the next day) would eventually go down, and the moment of the Beautiful People would pass just like any other fashion. For others, the raid simply signaled that the party had officially moved to a new location and a new host named Steve—Steve Mass, owner of the Mudd Club, which had opened the year before in lower Manhattan.

The Mudd Club was the latest in the progression of downtown hangouts that had begun in the mid-sixties with Max’s Kansas City. Max’s eventually begat CBGB’s, the Bowery bastion of New Wave and hardcore rock, where the Long Island band the Ramones got their start, only to see their fast, hard, gallows-funny tunes exported to England and imported back as punk rock in the form of the Sex Pistols. CBGB’s had been responsible for developing acts as disparate
as Blondie and the Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Wendy O. Williams’ Plasmatics. These were the bands that were finally starting to reach mainstream public consciousness, collectively labeled the New Wave by enthused rock critics.

The New Wave caught on in other cities. Gia had seen some of these bands at The Hot Club in Philadelphia. It was there that she had first laid eyes on Blondie’s lead singer Deborah Harry, who was replacing David Bowie as her new idol. Blondie was the most commercial of the New Wave bands, and a perfect new favorite for Gia, whose taste in music ran from rock ‘n’ roll to really goony pop songs her friends in Philadelphia sometimes teased her about liking—songs like “I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes.” She wasn’t so much drawn to music on the cutting edge as she was good at finding the next hip thing that would be reaching the mass market. Blondie, which had been kicking around for three or four years, was next. Gia’s personal interest in the band grew after a guy Sharon knew in the record business arranged for them to see a Blondie show at the Tower and later meet the band at their Philadelphia hotel.

The Mudd Club cloned the sensibility of CBGB’s onto Studio 54’s disco with a touch of G. G. Knickerbockers—the Forty-fifth Street club where the entertainment in the main Barnum Room was transvestites flying through the air into nets above the dance floor. Club Mudd had bizarre stage shows, never-advertised live music (sometimes the fledgling U2, sometimes Shoxlumania, who dressed as Ukrainian folk dancers), and a record mix by DJ Anita Sarko that was relentlessly, even frighteningly, eclectic. Physically, the place was an even bigger dump than CBGB’s, but it was more of a scene piece than a fully functional rock bar. And it reveled in its decadence—the open drug use, the sexual posturing—in a way even Studio couldn’t match. Andy Warhol reportedly described the phenomenon of the Mudd Club by explaining: “In the sixties, we all had plenty to get pissed off about. Now we’re too tired and jaded for that, so we come here to get pissed
on.”

The Mudd Club was much more Gia’s kind of place than Studio 54 had ever been. She could beautify
any
dance floor, but she thought of herself as a rock ‘n’ roll girl at heart.
And the Mudd Club certainly had both a rock sensibility and an arty edge. Downtown New Wavers mingled there with aspiring artists and performers who would become Robert Mapplethorpe and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Eric Bogosian and Ann Magnuson and Madonna. The house heroes—occasionally in residence—were Keith Richards, Marianne Faithful, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie, who was in town doing
The Elephant Man
on Broadway. All of this was still considered a little too dangerous for the
Vogue
world, but it was beginning to attract some uptown fascination—especially after the punk rock phenomenon produced its first front-page tragedy. On Friday October 13, Philadelphia-born Nancy Spungen was found murdered by her boyfriend, ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, in their room at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street.

“Downtown” was still a very foreign place to the mainstream fashion world. “I remember Way Bandy had a period when he was really becoming part of the downtown scene,” recalled hairstylist Maury Hopson. “He was kind of just doing it for business. He had this uptown image, and it sort of made him a little hotter and more mysterious to be seen in these clubs downtown.

“Uptown is more upscale; downtown is more real, in its phony way. The pretensions are different, basically.”

The drugs were slightly different as well. Besides alcohol, which was never really dethroned as the universal intoxicant of choice, the uptown world tended to gravitate toward
ups
, the downtowners to a more mixed bag of ups and downs. The difference between the scenes was the difference between a snort of cocaine and the injected cocaine spiked with heroin known as a “speedball.”

Drug use had become so casual that the biggest shock of the Studio raid was probably the realization that cocaine was, technically, still illegal. Cocaine, amphetamines and Quaaludes were casually administered. Unless a substance was cooked down and smoked as freebase, or injected, it hardly even counted. Stimulants were often being taken for practical, work-related reasons. Just like athletes drank Gatorade (to wash down the speed and steroids), nightlifers used cocaine because it was the only way that people with real jobs during the day could stay out all night. Sexual
athletes, especially gay men, added poppers to the menu: the amyl nitrite capsules, used medically to counteract angina attacks, were broken under the nose on the dance floor or during orgasm for the momentary rush. This was not drug experimentation—LSD had fallen from favor along with the whole idea of acid tests for mind expansion. This was medicine: better living through chemistry.

No matter how casual drug use had become, heroin remained the last taboo. Its use had not increased along with the dramatic rise in cocaine and other drugs—at least according to government statistics. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimated that in 1978, heroin addiction had reached its lowest point in years.

But heroin use was on the rise in Europe. The worsening problem in West Germany had been humanized recently by the magazine
Stern
, which published candid interviews with a fifteen-year-old heroin addict, prostitute and “girl of the streets” referred to as “Christiane F.” Her descriptions of Berlin in the mid-seventies, which later spawned a book and a film, didn’t sound all that much different from what was beginning to happen in New York.

Gia had never really cared for the modeling business from the very beginning, and her overnight success hadn’t changed her feeling that this was not the kind of world she would ever love. The money was suddenly pretty good and would only get better, the champagne and drugs were always the best available, and the parties were extravagant beyond belief. But the work itself, the way she spent most of her long, tiring days, was generally not very interesting to her. Modeling made her back and her brain sore. It required intense concentration on
not concentrating
on anything but moving and then
not moving.
People were always reaching out and touching her, but she wasn’t supposed to touch back. People were crowding in around her, fussing over her: painting her like a Seurat so that every tiny point of color was perfect and then lighting her up like a highway billboard. She was getting really sick of it. She wanted them to stop touching her.

Certain photographers, like Chris von Wangenheim, made her feel like she was
acting
rather than just standing there
looking pretty (or dancing around to make the camera think she was having a good time). And she was getting a lot of mileage out of treating the whole fashion photography world like it was a big joke. For some photographers, her disdain looked and sounded a lot like that
attitude thing
that was all the rage downtown. Her lateness, lack of proper respect and other unheard-of unprofessionalism was actually working to her advantage. The photographers were just like the guys who had been coming on to her since she was a kid, their numbers geometrically increasing since her pictures started appearing in the magazines: when she told them to kiss off, they just loved her more. It was an amusing little mind-game to play, but there wasn’t much to be won by winning.

Still, there was the money. There weren’t a lot of other legal ways for an eighteen-year-old girl to make a hundred thousand dollars a year—which it appeared she could easily make in 1979. And there were the all-expenses-paid trips. And even though she had long ago grown tired of the masses of men and women who showered her with compliments about her beauty, there were a handful of people whose approval very much mattered to her. There were her surrogate mothers in the business, Willie and Lizzette, who were very pleased with her progress. And then there was her real mother down in Bucks County at the receiving end of all those women’s magazine subscriptions. Kathleen was bursting with a kind of pride that Gia had never seen before.