Thing of Beauty (27 page)

“Gia would tell you all the stuff that most women want to know about the models,” Kathleen recalled. “Which one had hips that went on forever. Which one had the pimples. Which one did Quaaludes to get the starry looks in her eyes. Which one was a real dog. Which one was a superbitch. Which one ran around saying ‘Take my picture, take my picture,’ and was just so into the whole thing.

“In the beginning, we were both sort of star-struck. She went on the most fantastic trips. She always called from where she was. She met an Italian prince in Capri. He
loved
her, he wanted a photo of her. Finally she just ripped a picture out of a magazine and wrote on it, ‘Eat your heart out, Gia.’ Jack Nicholson tried to get her to meet him in his room. I was in New York that week. I was making slipcovers
for her sofa and she came back from this party and said, ‘Can you believe it, I just turned down Jack Nicholson?’ I said, “Thank god you did that, you don’t want to be involved with
him
.’

“She was in
Vogue
almost immediately—they
loved
her. She was always hard to get up in the morning, so they sent a limo for her. Whatever demand she made, she
could.
She wouldn’t work with certain people. And the more of a star she got to be, the more demanding she got to be.”

Many of her demands could only be fulfilled by Kathleen. The same young woman who was self-sufficient enough to live on her own as a high school student was suddenly calling on her mother, from New York, for every little thing. Gia was likely to make more money in the coming year than either her father or stepfather. But she wasn’t going to miss the chance to finally have Kathleen at her beck and call.

“Gia would announce, ‘I want you in New York,’ and she wanted me there at her disposal, to cook for her, whatever,” Kathleen recalled. “She couldn’t understand that I had a life with Henry. If she had had her way I would have been up there all the time. There were weeks when I would stay the whole week, never longer than two weeks. When she came home for the weekend I would go up there and get her. She knew she could get me to do anything she wanted. She was always demanding of my time. I didn’t do anything for her that I didn’t really want to do. I did it. I could’ve said no. But she was hard to say no to. I would have done it for any of my kids.”

To some of those close to Gia, the attention seemed like more than just a normal mother reveling in her daughter’s success. “Kathleen was driving up there to do Gia’s
laundry
,” recalled Nancy Adams. “When Gia and her brothers were kids, their mother wouldn’t do
anything
for them. They had to get up themselves, they had to do their own clothes. Now Gia’s a model, and she’s driving to New York to do her laundry for her.”

More often, though, Gia would save up her laundry to bring home. And even
that
was somehow exciting to Kathleen. “She must have had two washerloads of white socks,” she recalled. “When you have that kind of money, when
things are dirty, you just buy more. She would just buy stuff and leave it wherever she was.”

Suddenly, instead of frustration, Gia was bringing fun and excitement to her mother’s life. “Gia was good to me,” Kathleen said. “She was very thoughtful and took care of me. I remember one time we were driving to New York together in my ‘78 Corvette. We came up the Holland Tunnel and saw this cab go flying past. As we got to an intersection, he hit the curb and then he leaped in the air and dropped out of the sky onto the top of the ‘78 Corvette. Gia got out and started
screaming
at this cab driver. And the police are there, and she’s got this knife in her hand and she’s gonna knife this guy. And these New York cops are standing there watching this saying, ‘If she does knife him, we’ll never see it.’ She was on her way to a big party at Studio 54, but she handled the whole situation. She gave me money—she said, ‘Make sure you don’t let them know you have the money’—and she wanted to send me home in a limousine. She looked out for Mommy that night.

“She was, really, the whole world to me. When she was home, the whole house would fill up. When she left it was empty. She had a certain way of coming through the door, like the Fourth of July and all fireworks were going off.”

It was all so exciting for Kathleen that she was able to put aside any nagging doubts she had that Gia couldn’t handle what was happening.

“In some ways, I realized the pressure she was under … I knew about the business from when I was in retailing. Even then you had to be a very particular type of person to be able to handle modeling. It’s an ego trip, a lot of jealousies and backstabbing and petty stuff. It takes a certain amount of strength, and because it’s such a glamorous business, everybody thinks they’re better-looking than everybody else.

“I knew how beautiful she was and how fragile she was. And I had this vision of her becoming this Marilyn Monroe type and becoming a sex symbol and dying a very tragic death young.”

T
he new year brought Gia’s first magazine cover, the January 1979 issue of Italian
Cosmo.
When issues finally reached the few Manhattan newsstands that carried European magazines, Kathleen bought every copy she could find. The January issue of American
Vogue
included, besides six editorial shots of her, Gia’s first major advertisement: a Chris von Wangenheim shot for Gianni Versace.

Over the next months, as Gia marked her first anniversary in the business, the quality and quantity of her work skyrocketed. She went to Paris to do a sitting with Helmut Newton for French
Vogue.
Newton was nearing sixty, and he had been taking fashion photographs for various
Vogues
since the 1950s. He was raised in Berlin, but had moved to Australia during World War II and broke in at the
Vogue
edition there, eventually relocating to Paris, where he worked for all the major magazines. In the early seventies, he suffered a massive heart attack. When he recovered, his work became much more erotic, bizarre, powerful and self-consciously German. By photographing celebrities and fashion as if they were all beautified scenes from the cabarets of prewar Berlin and the lurid sex clubs on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, he had become modern just as his contemporaries were making their final slide into classicism.

Chris von Wangenheim, over twenty years his junior, was friendly with Newton. Those who appreciated the work of
both photographers, and recognized the differences in their approaches and results, usually referred to Von Wangenheim as Newton’s protégé. Von Wangenheim’s detractors referred to him as the “budget Helmut Newton,” since they sometimes mined similar visual veins and Von Wangenheim was considerably less expensive.

Von Wangenheim believed that his taste in models was incompatible with his friend’s, but Newton hired Gia for the next installment of his controversial series of cross-dressing women. He had shot women dressed in men’s clothes before, but he had something more elaborate in mind. “The man-woman ambiguity has always fascinated me,” he said. “… I had this idea in my head for some time: pictures of men and women together, only the men are women dressed up as men. But the illusion must be as perfect as possible, to try to confuse the reader.” The art director at French
Vogue
had encouraged Newton to incorporate the idea into a section featuring dresses and suits by the major French designers. In an ultimate expression of man-woman ambiguity, Newton cast Gia—whose reputation in the business as an aggressive androgyne was by now firmly established—as the very feminine object of desire.

The pictures went well, although Gia told friends she believed Newton didn’t really like her. She gigglingly reported his stunned expression when she referred to him to his face as “Daddy-o.” While she was in Europe, she also impishly breezed through collections sittings for both Italian
Bazaar
and Italian
Vogue.
During a Paris
Bazaar
shooting with Jean Pagliuso at the glass-doored entrance to a building, she poked fun at the rivalry between the two magazines. Pagliuso shot her writing “I love you, Francois Lamy” in lipstick on the glass door. Lamy was the photographer with whom she did the Armani collection for Italian
Vogue.

Gia was also booked to do her first trip for American
Vogue:
a swimwear excursion to Mexico. The photographer was Mike Reinhardt, and Gia was the promising rookie model tossed into the lineup with two of the most seasoned veterans: Janice Dickinson and Patti Hansen. Regardless of how the pictures turned out—like most of Reinhardt’s work, they would be predictably beautiful and sexy, and would show the clothes—the trip was, in its own way, seminal. It
brought together a small group that, individually, came to
define
their moment in the business.

Mike Reinhardt was always quite frank about his photographic influences. “I changed to photography when I saw
Blow Up
,” recalled the former California law student. “I thought, ‘Why am I sitting here when I can be out there doing that kind of thing?’ That’s really why I became a photographer.

“And I always ended up going out with my favorite model and having an affair with her. It was a part of my life, and it became sort of my image after a while … for about fifteen years, I had this sort of business-pleasure-oriented life which was always living with my favorite model … one was Janice Dickinson. I lived with her for four years. And then there was another girl called Lisa Taylor. I worked with her a lot and spent some time with her. There was a girl called Barbara Minty, who ended up marrying Steve McQueen, who I also had that kind of relationship with … oh, Christie Brinkley, I was with her for a while. And I had been divorced once—also from a model.

“So I was known for that. I had a very bad reputation. First of all, as a womanizer, which was true. And secondly that I did much more drugs than I ever really did … I mostly smoked pot. I was a grassaholic for twenty years basically. I just stopped two years ago. Fortunately, I never got into cocaine in a big way and I never really liked the drug very much, although I did it for a time … It was great, that time, it was fabulous, but it was crazy, really crazy. I now look back at it and think, ‘Jesus how did I do that?’ It was a nightmare, basically.”

Reinhardt’s relationships with models became the standard by which all other photographers were judged. “There is always that element of a photographer taking advantage of his power and using it for sexual favors,” he said. “At the time, I never saw what I was doing as taking advantage. But I realized later that it most certainly was. I would use them and they would use me. But I think that’s the nature of many relationships anyway, most relationships. There’s that element of … you could call it prostitution.

“The relationships with models happen, and they can be
a problem or not, depending on how the individual photographer handles it. To me, it became a problem toward the end of the relationship, because you’d fight so much. But I was always in a relationship, usually a four-year relationship. I don’t know why, it just always ended up that way. The first two years are great, the third year you start noticing that there’s a problem, and the fourth year you spend trying to figure out how the hell you’re going to get out of it.”

Reinhardt and Janice Dickinson were in the fourth year of their relationship. They had met in 1975—he was thirty-seven, she was twenty—and were introduced by Reinhardt’s friend Alex Chatelain. Her star rose as her new friends, the French Mafia photographers, proceeded to conquer America and the world. She became the “monster” model that everyone had told her she could never be.

Dickinson was a tall, athletically thin, former Floridian who had been repeatedly advised that her looks were too “ethnic” for top modeldom. But she had persevered nonetheless. In an industry where hardly anyone successfully worked her way to the top—most models just
happened
or not—Janice Dickinson was the exception that proved the rule. She bad risen by being fearless, outrageous and smart-mouthed. She all but dared the business to reject her, and she finally enlisted some powerful supporters after struggling for more than a year. An editor at the French magazine
Marie Claire
gave her European exposure. And the top booker at the Ford agency, French-born Monique Pillard, came to believe in Janice almost as much as the model believed in herself. Monique sold Janice hard, and her eventual success as a top model was a testimony to the alliance between a model and her agency. Their relationship was one of the quintessential booker-model bonds in the industry: they were closer than any mother and daughter, or any business partners, could usually afford to be.

“The booker knows much more about the girls sometimes than their own family does,” Monique said. “I used to say to Janice, ‘Not only do I have my life to live but I have
your
life to live as well.’ I used to go through the fights with the boyfriend, this and that, they have your phone number at home, they call you at midnight, they call you from an
airport in wherever they are because they don’t know which hotel to go to or they forgot. You become sort of a twenty-four-hour attendant. You are almost like the little cage where the puppy goes to spend the night.”

Dickinson didn’t generate a lot of American advertising work—it was hard for a brunette to get many ads, especially a brunette with such exotic, almost Oriental looks. But she made up for her lack of ads by doing an astonishing amount of editorial work. She was a constant cover girl in Europe, although she had never made the cover of American
Vogue.
It was a situation that justifiably irked her. And she dealt with the professional insult in her typically demure way.

“Janice called me one day,” recalled Sara Foley, “and [Condé Nast editorial director] Mr. Liberman happened to be in my office, which rarely happened. And she said, ‘Sara, do you think if I give Mr. Liberman a blow job, I can have a cover?’ I said, ‘Janice, can I call you back?’ She said, ‘No, really, do you think I should call him?’ Janice really did have the foulest mouth
ever
.”