Thing of Beauty (36 page)

A memorial service was held three days after Wilhelmina’s death at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. To some, the grief at the early evening event seemed barely skin deep.

“The memorial service on the Upper West Side was so typical of the way this game was going to go,” recalled Kay Mitchell. “And I was so
totally
naive about it. I went with Karen and Bob Hilton. Karen said, ‘Kay, why don’t you find a seat and I’ll be in in a minute.’ About fifteen, twenty minutes later, she’s still not there. I’m inside talking to a few people and I said, ‘Where’s Hilton?’ and someone said, ‘Oh, she’s outside
greeting
everybody.’

“I mean,
this is my girlfriend, okay?
And she’s outside stealing the thunder. People are coming in saying, ‘What are you doing in here, people are asking for you?’ It was very
much the one-upsmanship thing. And there were rumors circulating that John Casablancas was outside the memorial service talking with people, and that before Willie had died he was already talking with some of the girls: ‘She has cancer, the whole agency’s going to be a mess, come with us.’ There was going to be no time for grieving: you either got in line or not.”

But even with all the infighting, it was unclear if there even
was
a company without Willie. “I remember a girl saying she was thinking of going to Wilhelmina,” recalled Harry King, “and Way said, ‘Why on earth would you want to go to a dead woman’s agency?’”

Gia told friends that she and Sandy had a scene after the memorial service. “I remember her telling me that when Wilhelmina died,” recalled one friend, “Sandy was flipped out because Gia had gone dressed in this real nice, tight black dress with silk stockings and black high heels. And afterwards, she went back to Sandy’s apartment and waited for her in this dress. She said that Sandy had so much trouble dealing with her in these clothes because she thought of Gia as a boy.

“Gia said that after Willie died was the first time she really did heroin. She had snorted it—especially in Europe, where it was more popular and easier to get than cocaine. But after that she started shooting it.”

The heroin initially made her quite sick. Three days after one long night at the Mudd Club—where heroin use was quite open, especially in the upstairs lounge—Gia still felt so sick that she barely made it to a
Cosmo
cover try and a party at Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment. The next day she was forced to cancel the Timex TV ad with Avedon that had taken three different meetings to set up. She began to frequently “book out”—the term used when a model wants to be absolutely unavailable—and was often waking up ill. Each time, she wrote “sick” across the top of a datebook page.

She worked less frequently. To anyone who didn’t really understand what was going on, it might have seemed that she was giving herself some downtime and being “more selective.” Any model reaching the point she had in her career
might be encouraged by her agency to cut back somewhat on editorial work and concentrate on generating more big money advertising assignments for print and television.

If you were doing long editorial trips or three or four sittings a day in New York, it was hard to find time to work the people who gave out the precious few yearly or multiyear modeling and personal-service contracts. Garment manufacturers rarely made those kinds of deals. It was mostly cosmetics or perfume companies, which marketed absolutely nothing but image and a few cents’ worth of chemicals, and therefore placed a much higher value on the selling power of one face, one body, one look. Long-term deals with such companies came through more than just a model’s reputation in the fashion magazines or the devotion of a few big photographers or editors. This was business, the dating process in what could be a long professional marriage. It involved endless meetings, auditions and tests with the types of people
fashionistas
generally loathed: ad agency functionaries, art directors, executive types, folks with real jobs. It took time and the kind of patience and forethought that few models could be bothered with.

So to some, Gia probably appeared positively prudent for cutting back on editorial work. But she was actually just beginning to buckle under the pressure of the business and the drugs. Years later, those who survived the time period would look back at 1980 as the year the world they had created stopped taking orders from them.

For Gia, the downward spiral began just as she was making the connection that could possibly boost her to the next best thing to a cosmetics contract—a signature relationship with a booming American manufacturer. Her work in the Armani and Versace campaigns was making an impact worldwide.

The next major American designer to hit the jackpot was assuredly going to be Perry Ellis. The Virginia-born department store sportswear buyer had worked his way up in Manhattan Industries’ Vera company until, in 1978, they let him design his own sportswear line under the Portfolio label. After three successful collections—highlighting his interest in casual-looking clothes made with expensive natural fibers—Manhattan gave Ellis his own namesake line, and
soon Bloomingdale’s gave him his own shop. By April, it was abundantly clear to everyone, including the media-savvy designer, that Perry Ellis was going to be the first great fashion statement of the eighties.

Vogue
planned to make that statement in its August 1980 issue, offering major coverage of Ellis’s fall collection, retrospective shots of his previous collections and a profile of the designer. Gia was booked as the sole model for an Ellis sitting with Avedon. On Monday, April 21, the day before the shoot, Gia did a half-day for
Vogue
with Scavullo and went over to Perry Ellis’ Seventh Avenue offices for a fitting. On Tuesday, she did the Avedon editorial shots and on Thursday, she did a
Vogue
cover try with Avedon and Polly Mellen. On Friday, Gia was booked for another fitting, this time for Perry Ellis’ fashion show. She had not really done much runway, because she was considered too short and curvy for the work, and a less-than-elegant walker. But Ellis could see that his fall collection was going to be inextricably linked with Gia. In a way it made perfect sense, because her look was high fashion but unpretentious, European but American, just like his clothes.

Gia never showed up for the early evening Ellis fitting, so she did it over the weekend. On Monday morning, she did the show. According to
WWD
, the affair was packed “with enough photographers, buyers, foreign press and Fashion Groupies to rival a European collection.” During most of the show, Gia mimicked the other models as they happily bounded down the runway in Ellis’ bleacher-lined Seventh Avenue showroom. But, occasionally, the cameras would capture a grimace on her face.

T
hree days after the Perry Ellis show, Gia called Eileen Ford. She wanted to talk about changing agencies.

The battle at Wilhelmina was over, and Bruce Cooper had lost. Bill Weinberg and Fran Rothschild were going to take over the agency, keep the name, and buy him out. Kay Mitchell was still there, but her loyalties had always been with the Coopers: she was being kept on largely to provide introductions and smooth the way with her decade’s worth of contacts. Keeping Wilhelmina Models strong was going to be a difficult task. When it was just Ford and Wilhelmina, the differences were clear: conservative versus liberal, the mom’s agency and the daughter’s agency. Now Ford and Elite were at opposite ends of the spectrum, and without the overpowering presence of Willie herself, Wilhelmina seemed destined to be lost in that growing middle ground of the professional but lesser agencies: everything from Zoli and Stewart to the seamier companies set up by other Johnnies-come-lately.

Willie’s girls were looking around and many of the other top models were trying to assess where they wanted to be in the eighties. Like Gia, many of the models weren’t making these assessments with the clearest of heads. While they were all pretty well versed on the short-term effects of whatever they were using, little was known about the longer-term impact of the chemically enhanced highs and lows. For
most, it wasn’t really a question of physical addiction so much as personality changes: irritability, depression, paranoia, compulsive behavior. The simple truth was that while many of the Beautiful People drank a lot and took a lot of drugs, few of them were very good at it.

“This might sound a little crazy,” explained photographer Michael Tighe, “but by the time you learn enough about drugs and what they do to you, it’s too late to do anything about it. Sometimes when I look back and see what I was doing with the drugs … if I knew then what I know now, I think I could have done great as a junkie. I know the whole notion is probably ridiculous, but I think I could have functioned for years as a drug addict. I didn’t know what drugs did to you, or could do to you. By the time they consumed me, to where I didn’t want to know about anything else, it was too late to make it work in my life.”

Although it was unclear if she would end up at Ford or somewhere else, Gia began assembling pictures for a new model card and portfolio. In the meantime, she was falling apart, breaking even the very lax rules she had set for herself—and the industry had accepted—as she rose to fame. Instead of making people money, she was costing people money, including herself: if a booking was ruined by her nonperformance, she often had to pay the other models’ fees. She showed up six hours late for a Bruce Weber sitting for German
Vogue.
She stopped working for weeks at a time, and turned up a mess when she did show up. She did a Christian Dior fur ad with Chris von Wangenheim in which she and Patti Hansen looked like ghouls in mink. Von Wangenheim couldn’t have looked much better—his own career was beginning to fall apart because of existential angst, cocaine and the breakup of his marriage.

Gia was spending a lot of her time with Sandy Linter. Their relationship no longer appeared playful and outrageous to their colleagues. The industry’s soft-core porn fantasy was beginning to look like a scary series of Von Wangenheim outtakes.

Gia and Sandy would take the seaplane out to Fire Island or drive to Jones Beach for the weekend, or just for the day, working through what had become of their relationship.
Since Sandy had many more real friends in the business than Gia, most viewed what was happening to them as Gia dragging Sandy off the deep end with her.

“Gia explained this all to me later, and said she felt like she was a game to Sandy, an amusement,” Kathleen Sperr recalled. “I don’t know whether it’s because I don’t know how a woman feels about another woman, but when she explained some of these things to me, about these relationships, I just couldn’t comprehend it all. I just can’t comprehend that kind of relationship. I don’t know the feelings, how they come about. I can’t really relate to them. I could understand what she was saying … like who wanted what more. From what I knew, Gia had to be highly motivated on her own to want to spend that much time with Sandy. And the number of parking tickets she got … her car was parked there a lot and towed from in front of Sandy’s several times.”

“I just think Sandy wasn’t interested in having a relationship and Gia was,” recalled Nancy Adams. “I think it was over and Gia just kept coming back. Gia would call me and ask me to write her poems to give to Sandy. I remember telling Gia about a guy who wanted to go out with me. He was sending me all these letters and then he threw me this towel, and he said, ‘Here’s my towel, I’m not throwing it in yet.’ Well, don’t you know, Gia buys a pink towel and does the same thing to Sandy. But I got the impression that Sandy was just much more career-oriented than Gia, and was no longer willing to let whatever was between them hurt her professionally.”

Diane von Furstenberg, who Gia had met when they did an eleven-page
Vogue
ad section for Saks the year before, invited her and Sandy for a weekend at Calvin Klein’s beach house on Fire Island. “Gia was very sweet,” said Von Furstenberg. “She brought me this little toy, a little cat—my daughter always remembered that. There was some connection at that time between me and her—I don’t recall it now—but I wanted to help her. I recall going into her room and finding her sitting in the closet, looking into her bag. Much later, when I realized she was shooting up, I realized that’s what she was doing.”

Before and after the weekend, Gia called Von Fursten
berg often: she would later suggest to friends that she and the designer had a brief affair. Gia was also constantly calling her remaining friends at Wilhelmina—her booker Lucy Cobb and Karen Hilton. To try to help ease her pain, Gia went to the SPCA and arranged to adopt a cat, which she planned to name Pokey.

Soon, Gia was skipping bookings altogether. Or showing up high to the sittings. Or shooting up in the bathroom during sessions. She was booked to go to the Italian collections over the July 4 weekend: the
alta moda
at the Grand Hotel, just as she had done two summers before on her first-ever modeling trip. This time she took a cab to Kennedy Airport, saw that there was only a one-way ticket waiting for her and decided there was something wrong with the booking. So she turned around and took a cab home, vowing to get all her Wilhelmina vouchers paid off the next day so she could switch agencies.

“I called Wilhelmina’s [and] told them what happened,” she wrote in her datebook, where she usually only reported her business and personal appointments. “They thought I should have went … it seemed like a strange deal. Everyone at the agency kept saying I was to be paid $5,000, which is the right price for the trip. But at the end I would get $3,000.

“I don’t know what is happening in my life. Nothing seem[s] or feels right to me. I want to live so bad. But I am so terribly sad. I wish Wilhelmina didn’t die. She was so wonderful to talk to about work. I cry every day for a little while. I wish I knew what to do. I almost bought a beautiful cat today. But it had ring worm. I pray that things fall into place.”

Three days later, Gia was on the cover of American
Vogue.
She had been on the cover of
Cosmo
the previous month, and was also on the cover of the new French
Vogue.
But the cover of American
Vogue
was the Carnegie Hall of modeling. It was also, if she was still able to recall, the only thing she had ever wanted out of modeling.