Thing of Beauty (33 page)

And they were shot only days after the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and took both the American Embassy and the high-minded presidency of Jimmy Carter hostage. There wasn’t yet a hint that the event could provide the media-savvy campaign of Ronald Reagan with the rhetorical
“hook” it needed to promote the teleprompted conservative like a pair of designer jeans. It was still inconceivable that the techniques the beauty-industrial complex taught Madison Avenue could be used to sell the country its first spokesmodel president—a body-double leader who would then go to war against life in the fast lane as inconsistent with American values.

A
few days after the Versace shoot, a handful of the top models came together again for a different kind of sitting: an editorial shot for
Interview
to plug Sandy Linter’s book. Sandy had written or, rather, had been packaged into a how-to manual on “the new nighttime makeup” called
Disco Beauty.
The book featured photos of most of the top models of the day. Each picture was accompanied by a paint-by-number schematic drawing, detailing how “a good face—one that has been properly colored and contoured—creates an excitement, a magic and an evanescence that symbolizes the blinking, slinking, frantic fantasy world of an all-night disco.” The book had a cover shot of Bitten and opened to a picture of Juli Foster—topless and looking faux orgasmic. Then came a portrait of Sandy, the “most exciting new makeup artist in the country,” peering out through a soft-focus haze as part angel, part bleary-eyed, pouty-lipped disco queen. The rest was a hodgepodge of pictures culled from various editorial and test sessions Linter had done.

Photographer Michael Tighe had been assigned by
Interview
to take a picture of Linter with some of her model pals: Gia, Juli Foster and Patti Hansen. Under normal conditions, the shot would have taken no time at all. Tighe was known for his quick, controlled sessions and, besides, nobody was being paid. But normal conditions were no longer in vogue.

“Everyone was outloonying each other in one way or another,” recalled Marc Balet, then
Interview
art director. “Everyone was strange or stoned or drunk. The picture could have taken forty-five minutes to an hour. Instead, the makeup alone took an hour, and it took about six hours to take this picture. This is around when everything became very crazy in the business.”

Kay Mitchell, who came along with Hansen, recalled the session as the first time she realized Gia’s feelings for Sandy were romantic. “The two of them were obsessive,” she said, “and that became, really, pretty awkward. It seemed like quite a romance, you know, and it was the first time I had really actually
been there.”

“They all kind of showed up,” recalled Tighe. “I especially remember Gia. They had all put on their
Interview
T-shirts. Then Gia took off her shirt and was naked for a while and, well, it was an extraordinary figure she had. I was just quite taken with her beauty. Sandy took her shirt off too. The idea was to shoot them from overhead, all circled around Sandy. I ended up climbing on a ladder, and they were all sort of curled up with each other on the floor, just being very sexy with each other.

“I was trying to direct them, and they were rather rude to me. They just wanted to play with each other and have fun. I remember looking at Marc very frustrated and he got the clue I was having problems with them. He tried to direct them as much as he could.

“They were all very intimate with each other, but it’s easy for girls to be like that. I’d never really known Sandy. I remember the first time I met her, it was in Studio. A friend introduced me to her, and she gave me this big kiss because she was very impressed with my work. But we hadn’t worked together. Gia, I had only worked with occasionally; Juli, I had worked with quite a bit. They were all hugging each other, and being very silly and very crazy. I remember when we wrapped it up, Patti came up and gave me one of the greatest kisses of my life. But it wasn’t fun. They were very loud and girly and obnoxious.

“On the other hand, I’m sure I was stoned. I didn’t feel quite in control and my confidence probably wasn’t what it would have been a year before. I don’t know what was
known of
my
problems at that point. I felt so obvious at times, I’m surprised some people didn’t know what was happening. I had lost my studio: that picture was shot in the loft of a guy who had been my assistant. I had really pretty much lost my business. And, I don’t know that I was really trying to save my career. I was still more interested in shooting dope.”

Tighe was in the midst of a professional free-fall. He had been discovered by
Interview
in 1976 and quickly became a regular there—even though he was nineteen and still living with his parents. Within a year, he had a rep and a regular weekly gig shooting ads for Saks Fifth Avenue: having never worked as an assistant, he suddenly
had
an assistant and a studio at Eighteenth and Broadway. He also had a girlfriend who was a junkie, and while all his friends at Studio 54 were doing cocaine, he was right along with them, shooting heroin. He became a regular at the abandoned clubs on the Lower East Side, where heroin users from Manhattan and Long Island, too fearful to venture into Harlem, had created their own drug mall.

One round of New York
fashionistas
had already been totaled by cocaine, but falling fashion victim to heroin was still fairly avant-garde. Just as he had been professionally precocious, Tighe was ahead of his time in booting his life for heroin.

While Gia hadn’t tried heroin, she was deeply immersed in the drug culture herself. “I saw Gia and Sandy together one night and my heart broke,” recalled Sharon Beverly. “It was at some book party being held at one of the clubs. I hadn’t seen Gia in a long while and that was the first time I realized how many drugs she was taking. She was really high and I was, like, sick to my stomach to see her that way.

“I looked at her and I was trying to speak to her and she wasn’t making any sense, you know, she was so high. I said ‘Gia, what’s the
matter with you?’
And she said, ‘What are you talking about, nothing’s wrong.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what’s
going on
with you. You don’t seem like yourself.’ All she wanted to do was party. She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and she ran away from me. Then I knew something wasn’t right”

Drugs were cyclical, just like fashion. About every ten years, drug enforcement officials noticed a small increase in heroin use, and the public was predictably surprised. At the end of the fifties, it was the jazz players and the beatniks. At the end of the sixties, it was the college overexperimenters and the Vietnam vets. New York was large enough to have a small permanent junkie class—the far edge of life in Greenwich Village and Harlem—but it was prone to trends, too. The downtown art scene had never really given up on the sixties, or on heroin. The Velvet Underground had made its fame on Lou Reed’s song “Heroin” and that downtown anesthetic aesthetic always had a place in the popular mythology. The mythos was packaged in the early seventies by Bowie. It was licensed in the mid-seventies when
Interview
grew from an in-house organ to a widely distributed art tabloid. And it was mass consumed in 1977 when
Rolling Stone
moved from San Francisco to New York in time to turn the
Saturday Night Live
crew, the
Interview
crowd and anyone else too raw for
People
into a generation’s new rock stars.

In the process, New York became the epicenter of what was coming to be seen as a new “mass hip,” a kind of universal exclusivity where everyone felt they were in on the ground floor. “It was like everything John Lennon was doing in 1965 was working its way down to J.C. Penney,” said photographer John Stember. There were more people than ever looking for the next big thing: a curious combination of global events were conspiring to make it heroin.

The opium poppy crop in 1979 was the largest in recorded history: the fall of the tough-on-drugs Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan assured a virtual heroin free-for-all in areas where raw opium was usually stopped. The harvest was remarkable for its volume and its purity. Street heroin was commonly three to fifteen percent pure, which was why it had to be cooked down and injected to produce the desired effect. But heroin was beginning to appear at purities
starting
at twenty percent under a variety of street names like “Bang Bang” and “Casa Boom.”

“China Brown” became almost a brand name for heroin so pure that it didn’t need to be injected. It was presented to the Beautiful People as something to smoke or snort
when cocaine was no longer a thrill—or so much of a thrill that an industrial strength “down” was necessary. The assumption was that China Brown was “safe” as long as there were no needles involved. This was, of course, preposterous. So a new group of accidental junkies was being born. Newspaper articles about China Brown and an “Iranian Connection” further piqued interest. Drug-related deaths and emergency room episodes began to slowly rise.

Heroin business boomed. Dealers in one abandoned social club on Eldridge Street were reportedly selling $300,000 worth of heroin a day. “It was so out in the open that we used to hang out on the street and wait in line,” Michael Tighe recalled. “Each place had its own name. The Red Club was a place I went to a lot, 99X; they had wild names just to ID the heroin. At lunchtime on Eldridge Street there would literally be
hundreds
of people on the street copping heroin. There were so many of them that it became a crowd control problem. There were these little abandoned storefronts, and what they’d do is there was a parking lot on the street, and hundreds of people would line up. They’d let twenty, thirty people in, lock the door, everybody would buy their dope, let them out and let in twenty or thirty more. The heavies would stand outside the club with baseball bats because there was such a rush of people trying to get in.

“Back then, on the Lower East Side, there weren’t really any white people living there. If you were there and white, you were there to buy drugs. For me, it was all very exciting. It was the real underbelly of the city, very decadent and crazy. And, you know, in the seventies, as long as you did your work, nobody cared about drugs. Not even heroin. I was about twenty years old when I started shooting dope. You’re young and making a lot of money. Who’s gonna stop you, as long as you’re doing good work?

“After a while, I was buying in larger quantities. There was one guy I used to cop from a lot. I met him through this girl junkie I knew, this rock ‘n’ roll groupie, just a girl from Brooklyn who used to travel with Keith Richards. She introduced me to this guy; you had to spend several hundred dollars to see him. Downtown, you didn’t have to spend anything. To walk in this guy’s door, you had to
spend
… he was not gonna deal with people with fifty-dollar buys.
For a while, he was the only guy I went to. He lived on Eighteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. Keith used to cop from him, Debbie Harry too.

“There was also a while when I was going to Harlem a lot. It was very dangerous. It was all black, your life was much more in danger going up there. It was so obvious what a white person was doing there.”

The Mudd Club was often singled out as one center of the downtown drug trade. “Those days everyone had this idea that being a junkie was very glamorous,” Anita Sarko, the club’s top DJ, would later say. “That’s why you don’t see too many people from the Mudd Club around anymore—they’re either back in the Midwest or they’re dead.”

The modeling business knew full well how drugs and alcohol were affecting the girls. But awareness didn’t mean they knew what to do about it. Several years earlier, when they still had some control over their girls, the agencies could make good on threats of blackballing. But intoxicants were now so common that it seemed almost hypocritical to suggest that models “just didn’t do that” or that a model’s reputation could be “ruined.” Some models would assert that they needed cocaine to keep up with the bookings the agency was making for them. It had reached the point where some of the more wholesome top girls, like Kim Alexis, were being jeered behind their backs for being too straight and goody-goody.

The industry had its ongoing fears about drug use among its top models. The Fellini movie had been going on a little too long, even for a Fellini fan. “Those girls did a
lot
of drugs,” recalled photographer Mike Reinhardt. “It got to be a really, really weird scene. For about six months, Janice, my best friend Pierre Roulez, who later died, another top model and I sort of lived together and became very, very close and sort of binged on cocaine. Janice was … well, that was out of hand. And that’s why it ended basically. I couldn’t take it anymore and she left me. Janice was literally at a point of no return.

“And Patti [Hansen], well, Patti always was great. Somehow she always had her feet on the ground no matter how far she went. And I know she went far, drug-wise. We always somehow knew that she would find her way back.
Whereas with Janice, and of course Gia, you had the impression that, well…”

Just before Christmas, 1979, a chill went through the Wilhelmina agency: Keith Richards summoned Patti Hansen to his thirty-fifth birthday party at the Roxy. Richards might have been the free world’s most famous substance abuser. He had been atop rock music’s “most likely to expire” list for nearly a decade, and had been an admitted heroin user since the late sixties, when songs with unveiled junk references like “Sister Morphine” began to show up on Stones albums. Richards had lived on the edge for so long that the edge was now defined by where he lived.

Patti Hansen prepared for their arranged meeting—set up through Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Jerry Hall—by drinking a lot of vodka. She and Richards hit it off, even though he had come to the party with a girlfriend
and
Anita Pallenberg, his longtime heroin pal and the mother of his two children. Keith and Patti went back to his place and listened to some music. A few days later, she was at her apartment with friends when Keith called at three
A.M
. and asked her to come to another Manhattan club, Tramps. Her friends feared for her, especially when she disappeared for five days, which she later said was spent cruising Manhattan in Keith’s limo listening to reggae. Patti was taken by how skinny and lost he seemed, how defenseless. They spent New Year’s Eve partying with Robin Williams, and then she was off to Paris for the collections.