Thing of Beauty (28 page)

Janice was also one of the first models to benefit from the new trend of using print girls on the runway. Calvin Klein was the first designer media-savvy enough to realize that if he used well-known print models for his shows—instead of runway-only girls who, with the exception of Jerry Hall, rarely got public exposure—he had a better chance of getting shots in the magazines and newspapers. Janice was a good choice because she liked working a crowd and often loudly dished with her friends the photographers and fashion editors as she came down the runway.

Janice and Mike were a formidable team. Neither of them would ever be known as the top of the top, but they might have been the hardest working model and photographer in the business, the king and queen of the commercial photography lifers. True
fashionistas.
Janice, with her rock-hard body and iron constitution, was one of the party goddesses of the working models. Her ability to drink and drug and look perfect the next morning was a constant marvel to those of weaker wills. She and her sister Debbie, also an Elite model, were nightlife queens on two continents. Mike, with his constant flirtations and endless quests for fees, was an industry standard for enlightened self-interest.

As a pair, they pushed the boundaries of what the business would tolerate. When Elite was still struggling and Janice was one of the agency’s cash cows, she forced John Casablancas into an unheard of business compromise. “In this period during the model wars, models would blackmail the agents,” recalled one former Elite executive. “They would say, ‘I’m not paying you fifteen percent. If you want me to stay, I’ll pay ten percent.’ But Janice said, ‘Not only won’t I pay commission, but I want the commission
you
get from
your
client.’ And she got it. For a period of three or four weeks, she was also getting the commission from the client. The agency was
losing money on her.
Then word got out, and John had to make another arrangement.”

Patti Hansen was a different story. The youngest of six children of a Staten Island bus driver and housewife, she had dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to sign up with Wilhelmina. She had literally grown up in the business, eventually graduating from younger magazines like
Glamour
and
Seventeen
to a more high-fashion profile.

“She did a lot of running, jumping and leaping,” recalled Kay Mitchell, who was her booker at Wilhelmina and whose close relationship with her paralleled that of Janice and Monique. “She did a lot of trips and she was the little freckle-faced kid. Then she said she wanted to do more sophisticated pictures. So she went to Europe during the summer. In Italy she did photographs where she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. Everything was dark makeup, and they allowed her to make this amazing transition in everybody’s thinking. It was incredible because she could take those to
Vogue
and suddenly they didn’t see her as a junior look.”

By 1978, Hansen, at the age of twenty-one, was arguably the top model in the world. She was also considered perhaps the easiest to work with, the friendliest, a party girl but a professional. With her freckles covered over by heavy makeup and her comparatively zaftig figure reinvented as, in
People
magazine’s words, “a sexy extra 15 pounds of lushness on the competition,” she was a far bigger player in the day-in, day-out world of modeling than Cheryl Tiegs—who had become more of a disco-princess celebrity than a working girl, and had never really done much high fashion. Hansen
could do the cover of
any
magazine, she was on TV hawking Revlon’s Flex shampoo, and she had just finished the first Calvin Klein jeans ads with Scavullo, a billboard of which dominated Times Square.

Hansen had also recently appeared on the cover of the December 19 issue of
Esquire
, not as a faceless beauty but as herself. Her face and maillot-adorned torso were used to illustrate an article declaring 1978 “The Year of the Lusty Woman: It’s all right to be a sex object again.” In the cover’s lower lefthand corner was Hansen’s ticket out of anonymous stardom—“Model Patti Hansen: The Next Poster Queen?” The answer to the question was
no
, but her name and face had now been publicly linked. And that linkage reinforced the concept that top models were the ultimate lusty women. They were “working women” with perfect bodies and faces, “career girls” whose career was flirting.

The
Esquire
cover story was a watershed event in the debate over schizophrenic sexual roles of women—a debate the article examined, fueled and, ultimately, exploited. The piece opened with Betty Friedan asserting that “feminists all over the country … enjoy looking pretty and dressing up.” It went on to invoke the rise in popularity of jiggle TV shows, NFL cheerleaders, spandex disco clothes and million-selling pin-up posters of Farrah Fawcett and Cheryl Tiegs as proof that “women are … clearly enjoying the new freedoms that liberation has brought, not only in equality in the office and at home but in the equality of their sexual aggressiveness. They are putting on their second-skin clothes and high heels, and they are boldly asking for what they want. Their philosophy: Everything shows, anything goes.”

The article went on to quote such disparate sources as Frederick of Hollywood and feminist psychologist Dr. Phyllis Chesler, the latter of whom said, “We are living in a male homosexual culture—Wall Street, the Vatican, football teams, fashion designers … men are separatists, and they don’t want women around for longer than it takes to screw them.” A slew of fashion people—Scavullo, Norma Kamali,
WWD’s
June Weir—were asked to match wits with top feminist thinkers. Between the columns were photographs of top models in really tight clothes, which could be used both to
illustrate the “issues” and help
Esquire
readers to choose revealing outfits for their loved ones.

Besides good publicity for Hansen’s career—and a great launch for her poster—the
Esquire
cover had another consequence. It was spied by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who had noticed Hansen on the dance floor at Studio 54—where she often discoed late into the night in leopard tights, a leopard bra and cowboy boots. He put her lusty woman poster up on his wall.

Reinhardt, Dickinson, Hansen and Gia together in Mexico had all the makings of a beautified version of
Animal House.
And the week in Cuernavaca and Acapulco did not disappoint.

“The first thing I remember was getting a phone call at home at three in the morning from a hysterical editor telling me her toilet didn’t flush,” recalled Sara Foley. “They were supposed to stay with the governor of Cuernavaca or something, and the governor had been there, and his sons, too, and then the governor left and two bodyguards were left behind. Then the guards got totally drunk and they were sitting there with these machine guns and wouldn’t let any of them into the house. And they were holed up in this room, and the hairdresser had to sleep in a hammock by the pool or something …”

The trip degenerated from there. “Oh, Christ that was a tough trip,” Reinhardt recalled, “between the three of them. Gia was impossible, I mean
totally
impossible. Just unfriendly, difficult, uncooperative, the works … erratic, one day she’d be nice and then she’d be … I wanted her to turn her back, and she said, ‘I don’t do back pictures.’ I mean, this is somebody who’s
not big yet

“I don’t know. A lot of it, absolutely, is that the business creates monsters. They end up telling these girls, ‘Oh, you’re the best, you’re the greatest, oh my god.’ I remember one editor was making a cover with Janice and she said, ‘If she looks like that again, I’m going to have to
cry
, it’s so beautiful.’ They’re so
fake.
But then the girls begin to believe it. They’re fragile, usually not greatly educated young people, who are overwhelmed by this incredible power they’re suddenly given, and the money. A lot of them don’t come from
wealthy backgrounds and suddenly they can travel, take the Concorde, go to LA … producers, directors, stars are after them, and it just goes to their head. They explode.”

Several weeks after Mexico, Gia went on a trip for
Glamour
, a working cruise—her first time at sea—that would end on the Caribbean Island of Mustique. The photographer was British-born John Stember. He had come to America via Paris and his first wife, Charlie, had been one of the original Paris Elite models, inspiring the perfume line of the same name. But Stember was from another era in the business.

“I started as an assistant to an English photographer called John French,” Stember recalled. “When John French came in the studio in the morning, the clients would stand in the shadows in the back. He would have a line of assistants. It was like a military operation. He would walk in. He would never,
ever
look through a camera himself. He had two assistants to do that. He would stand by the camera and he would say ‘still’ and the camera would go
plop.
He’d do that six times and he’d say, “Thank you everybody so much,’ and he would walk out and everybody would clap. And that was it. And the guy got a huge check and the clients would never approach him, except maybe feebly to say, ‘Thank you very much.’ It was like dealing with royalty.”

Stember had gone from that rarefied experience to a far more Bohemian lifestyle, which he lived for nearly twenty years in the business. “Suddenly, 1978-79 came along and these fucking guys start coming and saying, ‘Listen, come advertise our cigarettes, we’ll pay you $15,000 a day,’” he recalled. “I was making $150 a page doing editorial, the most you could get was $2,500 a day for fashion ads. They started talking about $10,000, $12,000, $15,000
a day
. So basically, I suddenly became aware of money and big studios and staff and cars and drivers and all this crap, you know. And the way the magazines were, we were living like fucking
millionaires.
It was a great time, I have to say. We did everything, and we had so much money we didn’t know what to do with it. Basically the biggest problem I had during the day was to think what was the ultimate place we could go
to and the ultimate thing we could do. It was fantastic, and everything we could think of just got charged to someone.”

Glamour
was one of Stember’s regular editorial clients, and he had already done a few shots of Gia for the magazine—basically cover tries and tests in his Carnegie Hall studio. This cruise was their first major trip together. “We chartered this fucking great eighty-five-foot yacht out of St. Vincent to go sailing for two weeks and we were going to do our fashion story and beauty story,” Stember recalled. “There’s eight of us: Gia and Bitten, the two models, I’ve got a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a fashion editor, her assistant, myself and my assistant. So, first day, we don’t get very much done, but we’re all sort of getting used to it. Second day, okay, we’ve really got to get going here cause we have a lot of work to do. So I make a seven o’clock call and seven comes along and we all get up and no Gia. So eight o’clock, okay, this is getting ridiculous. I send my assistant down to get Gia up. I get the report back from the assistant that Gia doesn’t
feel like
getting up. So then I go down and bang on the door, ‘Gia, come on, we’ve got a lot of work to do, the sun is good,’ so we wait and wait. Finally, about nine o’clock Gia comes up on deck in her swimming costume and I say, ‘Gia,
come on
, you’re supposed to be ready. What the fuck are you doing? We’ve got twenty pages of beauty to do, you have to get your act together.’

“Her response is ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I meant to tell you last night, but I quit modeling.’ I said, ‘What do you
mean
you quit modeling? You’re here on a trip. You can’t just tell me you quit modeling, we’re out in the middle of the fucking ocean.’ So I looked at the editor and she said, ‘You can’t quit.’ And Gia said, ‘You want to fucking bet? I quit I’m snorkeling today.’ She said, ‘Can you teach me how to snorkel? I might work a day if you teach me how to snorkel.’ And this is what I had.”

While she later deigned to cooperate on some shots, Gia continued to provoke Stember and his crew. “I was meditating at the time, you know,” he recalled. “And I was sitting there on my bunk meditating and there was a little hatch above me. Suddenly I heard this sort of scuffling, but I wouldn’t open my eyes. And the next thing
bang, bam, bam, bam
, she and Bitten are lowering a radio full volume on a
string. I’m trying to meditate and this radio is sitting in front of my face, full volume.

“Then the next thing is they’re both lying on deck, completely naked both of them, both holding sun oil, saying, ‘John, please would you put some sun oil on us?’ And I’m saying, ‘Listen, guys, you know I’m married’ [at that time to second wife, model Carrie Lowell], but they say, ‘But you have to do it.’ And this is the sort of games they’re playing. Wearing dresses with no underwear, sitting, like, with their legs wide open. And I come out of the companionway up to dinner and here they are sitting like that, just to provoke, constant provocation.

“One night we decided to play Monopoly. So, of course, with Gia and Bitten, I have to almost punch both of them out. Gia had a knife to Bitten’s throat because she thought she was cheating and had taken one of her properties. She was prepared to kill her. It took me two days to get them to stop threatening to kill each other.”

Stember was going to do as many shots as possible with Bitten, to avoid Gia. “But Bitten was like this white thing from Denmark, who had never really been in the sun before,” he recalled. “She blew up like a balloon. Her lips were all these heat bumps, and whatever, sores, all over her face. So I had to do everything with her looking up through about three feet of water. It was the only way I could get her face to look normal: the distortion of the water made it look alright. It was completely mad. Gia was like swimming around the boat, saying, ‘Woo, woo, what are you doing, baby? Are you working?’

“We got to Mustique and we went to this bar called Basil’s. Gia walked in and, at that time, her body, she just looked so amazing, all tan and everything. We walked up to this bar and she sat at the bar with her breasts kind of hanging over and this guy by the bar—a young black guy, you know—this guy didn’t know
what
had arrived. He was so freaked, he went off on this spurt of poetic dissertation, every word and beautiful thing he could muster in his entire being was being presented to Gia because she was so beautiful. He was saying, ‘You’re the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life, every pore of my
body is alive with your beauty’ … he went on like this for about fifteen minutes.