Thing of Beauty (37 page)

“I think maybe the parents didn’t understand what was going on,” said Sean Byrnes. “I mean, you see your daughter on the cover of a magazine, great, what could be going wrong?”

In fact, nobody had really tried to tell Gia’s parents anything was wrong. Even when Willie was alive, the agency had never perceived Gia’s relationship with either of her parents as strong enough to be of help if there was a problem. Gia would occasionally send her mother in to turn in vouchers or pick up checks if she was in New York, but she was not thought of as one of the girls with an omnipresent, all-protective “model-mom.” Kathleen would have been only too happy to take on that role: Gia had never let her.

Willie had been the only person at the agency with any inkling about Gia’s relationship with her mother. When Karen Hilton took Willie’s place, she accepted Gia’s version of her life situation: that she was estranged from her broken family and her parents could not be counted upon to get involved. Karen did not take Gia’s drug use lightly; she just didn’t consider the family an option. So Gia’s problems were dealt with internally.

“Wilhelmina’s agency never called me about
any
drug problems,” said Kathleen Sperr. “I think they denied it They were making big bucks off of her. It’s amazed me as more time has gone by that they never did contact me. They would have known what was happening. They knew they were working with very young impressionable girls. I mean, if they had her best interests at heart …”

But Gia’s agents weren’t the only ones in denial. Kathleen had been disregarding clues for months, perhaps even longer. “I think Gia was trying to tell me, had I not been so blind to it,” Kathleen recalled. “I remember one night she took me out to dinner in New York. She wasn’t right. All through dinner she was trying to tell me something. She kept telling me, ‘I have this big, big problem.’ And I kept saying, ‘Well, Gia, you’re a survivor like me. Whatever this problem is, you’ll work it out You’ll get over it.’

“She was trying to tell me this big story—something with a job that had happened that week. But she was very vague about the whole thing. That’s what she would do. The first time she unloaded something, she’d skirt all around it. Later she would talk to you about it as if she had already told you. And the way she explained it all, I didn’t realize how really important what she was trying to tell me was.

“Maybe as her mother I was not ready to face it. It’s only
because I’ve been through as much therapy as I have since, that I realize I probably failed her at that moment. She probably didn’t want to let me down and let me know what was really wrong. Maybe she didn’t think I could handle it—because I thought she was so wonderful.”

The structure of the modeling business could work for or against a model with personal problems. Because so many jobs were contracted at the last minute—based on past performance, recent photographs and a hunch—a disparaging rumor about a model could be enough to make a client choose someone else. One bad day in a model’s career could really resonate: especially if she had two or three bookings that day, or annoyed a particularly influential client. But everyone also knew that one client’s nightmare girl was another’s Princess Charming. Some girls were even more attractive to photographers when they were high than when they were straight: certain drugs produced certain faraway looks or stoked certain inner fires that worked for certain pictures. And certain girls had looks that were so specific—and, at that moment, essential—that it was worth risking a session in which the model couldn’t perform on the chance that she could, if only for a moment. They only needed one perfect picture: if it was perfect, it didn’t matter if it had been the first (and only) shot, or the last of thousands.

And when Gia showed up straight to sessions—or showed up at all—some remarkable pictures were taken. The best of them even had a certain quality that earlier photographs of her lacked: the shots were actually beginning to look like Gia. The girl in the magazine was beginning to more closely resemble the girl who slumped into the chair in front of the makeup mirror each morning—the girl who, on “bad days,” showed up so wrecked that someone had to hold her head up while the makeup was applied.

The change in the pictures was partially attributable to new directions in makeup. Less drastic, more naturalistic looks were coming into style—it was becoming less fashionable to just repaint the girls’ faces. But it also appeared that Gia’s looks were growing stronger, more defined, more loved by the camera, even as she was ravaging her body with drugs. And photographers seemed to have an increasing
fascination with shooting a more “real Gia” as she grew from a spoiled pretty girl into a beautiful riddle—the answer to which people feared knowing.

“She scared me a little bit,” recalled Harry King. “There was something about her that made me feel uneasy. I used to say it to Way: ‘She has a demon inside of her.’”

Just as Gia’s
Vogue
cover hit the stands, the model wars went nuclear. Patti Hansen and her $300,000 annual billings left Wilhelmina Models for John Casablancas’ Elite. She claimed the reason was that the Wilhelmina executives had discouraged her from pursuing film projects, but some thought otherwise. “Hansen left the agency because of a personal falling out between she and my wife Karen,” recalled Bob Hilton. “For some reason, Patti decided that Karen didn’t support her relationship with Keith [Richards], even though I thought we both communicated very well with Keith and both liked him a lot.

“And I never saw any kind of direct relationship between the tremendous increase in the drug use and her relationship with Keith that everyone seemed afraid of. Patti just used a lot of coke, but no more than anybody else around that time. Keith was actually a lot cleaner at that time than people gave him credit for. He was a hell of a lot cleaner than
a lot
of the people in the fashion business. He was always drinking bourbon and doing coke and stuff, but he was in remarkably good shape as far as I could tell.”

After Hansen’s switch, Esme Marshall and her $200,000 annual billings left Elite. Over the past months, Esme had let her trademark short hair grow out and let her professional guard down. She, like Gia, was showing up late and missing bookings. Her problems were rumored to be more boyfriend-related than drug-related, although she vigorously denied having any problems at all. “Let me tell you something,” Janice Dickinson would later recall, “if Esme didn’t show up for work, it’s probably because she was covered in bruises and didn’t want people to see her like that. Esme was getting the shit kicked out of her. She just entered into this Svengali relationship. When someone is not showing up for bookings, it’s a cry for help.”

Esme fled Elite, which she said was “getting too big,” to
become the sole client of a new agency called Fame, run by forty-one-year-old salsa record producer Jerry Masucci, and co-owned by the Fords. She brought her Elite booker along with her, and her boyfriend as well. “It was beyond my control,” Esme would later admit. “He used to not let me go to bookings. It was very weird. He tried to run me over once. He was jealous of my booker ‘controlling’ me. I think he was totally jealous, or believed the woman should stay at home. But then he was proud! When ads would come out, he’d say, “That’s my beautiful girlfriend.’ He was Jekyll and Hyde.”

While all this was going on, Beverly Johnson, the industry’s top black model, set a land-speed record by moving from Elite to Ford and back to Elite in one week. Not long afterwards, she and Hansen were photographed on the dance floor at Xenon with John Casablancas. The club was where Elite threw its frequent parties, mailing agency T-shirts out as invitations and waiting to see how suggestively the models could tie or tear them. One night Casablancas even had a pool put onto the dance floor so the T-shirts could be properly wetted.

Turning down the agency’s suggestion that she seek drug counseling with Robert Hilton, Gia instead took the suggestion of Scavullo and others in seeing Park Avenue nutritionist Dr. Robert Giller. She went in late July, after a hellish two-week stretch during which the combination of the heroin, her period and her desire to keep working nearly did her in. She lost ten pounds very rapidly, barely made it through a lingerie shooting for Diane von Furstenberg, and somehow bluffed her way through a party her mother threw for her brother Joey’s wedding. Joey’s first marriage had ended in divorce; his daughter had gone to live with her mother in California. Of the three Carangi children, Joey had always been the most estranged from his mother, so Kathleen was trying to make everything perfect. She had been noticing that something was not right about Gia, but there hadn’t been much time to talk. Especially after Gia cut short the week’s vacation she had planned by returning to New York after two days.

Giller was the latest of the Dr. Feelgoods, the next in a long line of medical professionals employing hair tests, nutritional
analyses and vitamin injections. The difference between Oilier and his predecessors was that he not only had the requisite celebrity clients, but he hung out with them It was no wonder that his B-12 shots were the morning jump-start of choice for the Studio 54 crowd: he was one of the crowd. He would later write a best-selling fitness book,
Medical Makeover
, which featured many celebrity endorsements and Giller’s “No-Willpower Program for Lifetime Health” that allowed a reader to “kick all your bad habits for good—in eight weeks or less!” Giller charged her $140 for the initial visit and sold her $61 worth of vitamin supplements: Gia felt assured that the doctor could help her kick drugs with his approach.

The day after Gia’s first visit with Giller, she was taken to lunch at the Oyster Bar by her booker at Wilhelmina, Lucy Cobb, and
Vogue
model editor Sara Foley. They hoped that by ganging up on her, they might impress upon her just exactly what she was throwing away. “People were, at this point, bending over backwards for her,” recalled Lucy Cobb. “Gia was not showing up for bookings, costing them a lot of money. Even under those circumstances—which usually would assure the girl would
never
be booked again—the magazine would give Gia another chance. She had already blown it with them, I don’t know how many times. Sara and I both wanted her to work for
Vogue.
We were just like, ‘C’mon, Gia, get it together, be a
little bit
responsible.’ She always meant well. She tried. It was just really hard for her.”

The magazine was willing to give her one more chance, even though she had pulled the ultimate stunt, creating one of the fastest-traveling anecdotes in the history of fashion: she had walked out on Dick Avedon.

“She used to tell me that story herself, she thought it was great,” recalled John Stember. “She went to do a cover for
Vogue.
They did all the hair and makeup and spent all those fucking hours getting her ready and getting her dressed and the editor was flitting around saying, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, she’s the most gorgeous thing in the world,’ screaming at the assistants, you know. So Avedon goes
click
, one click. And Gia says, ‘Hold on a second, I’ve got to go to the bathroom.’ So she goes to the bathroom to have a pee. She climbs out the window, gets in a cab and goes home.”

Even after that, Gia continued working for
Vogue
, where her cover had been doing extremely well on the newsstands. She managed to stay clean for several weeks—at least during working hours—and did sittings with Denis Piel, Chris von Wangenheim and Arthur Elgort. Then
Vogue
sent her on a week-long trip to Southampton with Scavullo. Harry King was doing hair, Sandy Linter makeup. Instead of going with the others, Gia insisted on driving her own car out to Scavullo’s house, after first stopping off at Dr. Giller’s for a vitamin shot.

Vogue
was hoping for a replay of Gia and Scavullo’s highly successful trip to St. Barts. Instead, the trip turned out to be a nightmare.

It began when one of Scavullo’s assistants pushed Gia into the pool. “The poor guy just didn’t realize you don’t push top models into pools,” recalled Harry King. “I think she found it difficult to be around a lot of people anyway. And she had pulled herself together to come down and hang out with an editor, her assistant, makeup, hair, two photographer’s assistants, three other models. She had pulled it together to come do that, and she’s there two seconds and this guy was, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to push you in the
pool. ‘
And in she went. She tried to make light of it. She was smoking a cigarette at the time, and I remember she came up with the cigarette in her mouth.”

“She was so upset, she started to cry,” recalled Scavullo. “I fired the assistant on the spot. She hated that kind of guy”

From that point on, the trip degenerated. “She would drive off,” recalled Harry King. “We assumed she was looking for drugs.” They also assumed that she found drugs. And when the pictures were finally delivered to
Vogue
, so did the magazine’s fashion department In a number of the shots—which were of bathing suits and summerwear—there were visible, red bumps in the crooks of her elbows, track marks. “I remember when those pictures came in,” said Sara Foley, “there was a big scene in the art department.” The shots were edited and airbrushed to minimize the obvious, but several pictures eventually ran in the November 1980 issue where the needle marks were visible.

Gia did one more sitting for
Vogue
the day she returned
from Southampton, with Denis Piel and Polly Mellen. The shot, a beauty picture for an article on the “fragrance collections,” was one of Piel’s best, a seemingly stolen moment of Gia, sitting in a wooden chair, tugging at the front of her spaghetti-strap dress and peering down at herself. The session was Gia’s last major work for the magazine, because it was finally clear that she could not go on—or she had at last violated even
Vogue’s
standards for indulgence.

“At one shoot, she had fallen asleep and we had to wait and leave her in the chair until she woke up,” recalled Polly Mellen. “And this other time—it was
shocking
, this incident. We were shooting her in a very bare dress and the photographer said, ‘Polly, could you come here and look through the camera.’ And there was blood coming down her arm, from where she injected herself while we were shooting.”