Thing of Beauty (38 page)

But
Vogue
was just one of many clients. Two days after her last
Vogue
session, Gia had a full day that hardly suggested her career was in jeopardy. She had a morning screen test for Peter Bogdanovich’s new film, which she missed because of a Perry Ellis fitting and another catalog shot. Late in the afternoon, she went to Scavullo’s studio to be interviewed for the coffee-table beauty book
Scavullo Women
he and Sean Byrnes were preparing for publication in 1982. And in the evening she met with director Franco Zeffirelli, who also wanted to see her about a film. Several days later she took a late afternoon flight from New York to Los Angeles, did a four-and-a-half-hour lingerie sitting, picked up a voucher for $1,575 and caught the red-eye back to New York.

But not long after, the work began to dry up, and her professional friends fled for their own lives. Sandy Linter refused to even take her phone calls: one night, in desperation, Gia had climbed up the outside of Sandy’s apartment building to try to break into one of her windows so they could talk.

“You know, there are hardly any girls who disappear when they’re reaching their height,” said Scavullo. “They usually stay around until you can’t photograph them any longer. There were lots of girls who were victims of those times—the nightlife, Studio 54, dancing, having fun. There were girls who took a lot of coke and destroyed their beauty.
But I don’t think Gia was one of those. I think she was a victim of herself … she was too smart for the world she had come into. I don’t mean the fashion world. I mean
this
world.”

In early November, Gia moved back uptown, to East Fifty-third Street, to put some distance between herself and the Lower East Side, and try to get a handle on her life. She also agreed to move to Eileen Ford, the agent least likely to tolerate her drug use. To the untrained eye, it looked like one more big model switching agencies in a power play. But the agencies knew better. They knew that Gia’s drug problem was the one that everyone else in the industry judged theirs against. They also knew that any agency that succeeded in helping her clean up would find itself with a valuable commodity. The business was still waiting to forgive her. She was still poised for that half-million-dollar-a-year career that Willie had talked about in
Philadelphia
magazine.

The day before she was supposed to sign the papers to switch to Ford, Gia finally met with Robert Hilton—who was being paid by Wilhelmina Models to counsel her. To break the ice, Hilton told her some war stories about his experiences as a heroin addict in San Francisco in the late sixties. The tale that affected her the most was about a foiled apartment robbery attempt in which his junkie partner got stabbed in the chest with an ice pick. Hilton told Gia that all he could think, as his friend died in his arms, was that if he followed through and stole something he could at least get high.

“That story really got to her,” Hilton recalled. “You get a bunch of dopers sitting around and there’s going to be a large aspect of death talk, because somebody is always overdosing, being dumped in an emergency room. So she started telling me about the shit she had done on the Lower East Side. You know, it’s funny, but I didn’t think the Lower East Side was anything peculiar at the time. Now I realize it was just outrageous, but, at the time … New York was in the middle of some kind of wacky cultural explosion, some convergence of music and fashion and art and literature
and everything just kind of … life just kind of
opened.
That kind of selling of heroin just seemed part of it.

“Gia spent an awful lot of time down there. She went through an awful lot of money, you know. For a heroin addict to go downtown and spend $100, that’s ten bags of dope: that’s a nice hit. Gia had no problem going down and spending $2,000, $3,000
a day
. I don’t know how the hell she did it. I mean, her anecdotal stories of drug use was the thing that I couldn’t quite get. She wasn’t that big a girl. But I guess her tolerance must have been ridiculous, because some other people who knew her said she had, in fact, run through that kind of money.

“She had had a couple of overdoses, in the shooting galleries. Do you know what happens to drug addicts when they overdose? What drug addicts do to other drug addicts? They throw them into a tub full of ice cold water or inject them with milk or saltwater. She was a regular at the shooting galleries down in the Lower East Side.

“It was actually ridiculous how many times she overdosed. She was a real pig for heroin, a real glutton. She had a definite love affair with the stuff, she was crazy about it. Gia was the perfect candidate to be a heroin addict. Because, left to her own devices, she really had an awful, awful lot of self-loathing. And heroin does not kick you into overdrive the way cocaine does. Heroin has the effect of making the whole universe a real friendly place and it was almost as though she had found a perfect prescription for her personality. Because she was one kid that was in a
lot of pain
, and there was just something about the way her pain resonated. I felt it a lot.”

She never really explained to him where the pain came from. “The only way I could paraphrase what she was saying,” he recalled, “was that she felt like a fraud. She said ‘fake’ or ‘phony,’ like a prom queen. Whenever Gia got dressed up and stood in front of the camera, with the makeup and the hair and all that, the distance between that and her inner life made her feel like a fake.

“She also talked a lot about having her heart broken by Sandy. That was a very significant relationship to her. A big part of this, I think, was about her sexuality.

“And then, of course, there was the modeling business
itself. With the way Gia felt about herself, I could never figure out how, of all the careers on the face of the earth, this kid could end up modeling. It was only because she had this ability to kick into this childlike overdrive and let herself play in front of the camera that she could do it. ‘Cause, man, real deep down, she didn’t like herself at all. Sometimes she felt good when she was in front of the camera, but it was only temporary, and she knew that. I don’t know, a lot of people never thought Gia was too bright. I never felt that way. I thought she was a real smart kid and part of the problem with her was that everything good about modeling was only temporary and it only made things feel better for a while.

“The worst thing that happened to Gia was that she became successful. The last thing in the world that girl needed was to be indulged and she was indulged constantly. She could show up three days late and be in the most absolutely despicable condition and that
minute
she was forgiven—for having that face and looking that way. And boy, she was
real beautiful.
There was just this quality about her, almost impossible to describe … and I don’t think that kind of beauty can ever be
just
physical, that kind of feeling that somebody gives us. She just had a rich, sensual look to her face that was, well, it was
staggering.

“And a lot of people’s careers and fortunes and futures rode on her. They didn’t care about her, they put up with her. And the only reason they did was because it affected
their
lives. She wasn’t well-spoken, she wasn’t articulate. These fucking people had no use or love for her except for the fact that she made money for them and they put up with her as though they loved her, as though they cared for her. Everybody talked about how they loved her. Bullshit. She wasn’t that easy to be around.”

Hilton never forgot a story he was told by Gerald Marie, who was the head of Elite in Paris (and later married model Linda Evangelista). “I remember one time I was over there and he took me by this place—it was a girls’ school,” he recalled. “And he said when Gia first started coming to Paris, he would take her and drop her off there in front of the school and leave her there. It was like a treat for her. I
mean, at the time, I laughed like hell. But later I really thought that was so exploitative and sick.”

While he understood a lot of what Gia was telling him—more than her parents, family or friends could possibly have—Hilton didn’t have a lot of training in actual “therapeutic techniques. He was an experienced peer counselor and knew how to use the “I’ve been there” routine to form a bond. But he had yet to learn what to do if finding someone to talk to wasn’t enough.

“There were a lot of things about Gia’s pain that I had difficulty with. I now know a lot more about why, since I’ve been to graduate school and don’t
only
do the ex-addict-to-addict stuff. These things were difficult for me then because, basically … there was no way to say to her, ‘Don’t deal with the pain,’ and there was no way to even
begin
to diminish it. She would say, ‘This makes it go away.’ And I would say, ‘Well it’s killing you.’ But, to her, that was real secondary shit. I mean, first of all, it’s never real for people in that situation, they’re always invincible. But, really, she didn’t
care
if it was killing her. All that mattered to her was that, for a little while, she didn’t feel that pain.

“Gia was the first model who had really made it, who had a tremendous name, and whose drug problems had to be dealt with in any profound way. Everyone else, for the most part, was still working, still doing what they were supposed to be doing: it got worse for some of them later. But Gia does not stand as a testament to my abilities as a therapist
at all.
She did try to get cleaned up. I’ve got to give her credit, she tried. She did make an effort.”

Hilton tried to convince Gia that she should call him or come see him whenever she felt the urge to head to Eldridge Street was growing too strong. “She called me from shoots and stuff, running out the door,” he recalled. “But I didn’t have any way to stop her. She’d call and say, ‘I can’t take it, I’m going to go out and do it.’ What was real clear to me was that there was no way in the world that some counselor, or outpatient clinic, was going to help her. Certainly not me, unless she was going to come and live with me and I was going to watch her twenty-four hours a day. And even at that, she was so unbelievably manipulative. I finally said,
‘Listen, this girl needs a therapeutic community.’ A suggestion like that, of course, was not an option.”

It was not an option because Gia had already left Wilhelmina. She had signed with Ford, where she lasted a couple of weeks.

In mid-November, Kathleen Sperr came to New York to help Gia set up her new uptown apartment. She still did not know for certain about Gia’s drug problems—or she wouldn’t let herself know. She continued to see Gia’s out-of-control lifestyle as part of the glamour of being a top model. She continued to see whatever setbacks Gia seemed to be having as the petty jealousies of a glamorous industry. She even saw the fact that Gia needed her help setting up a new place because she had simply
left
many of her things in her last apartment—the clothes, some of the guitars she bought even though she couldn’t play—as part of the twenty-year-old’s prerogative as a famous person.

“I had had my suspicions before,” Kathleen recalled. “Suddenly, I couldn’t get her on the phone: I had
always
been able to get her on the phone, we spoke daily when she was in the country. Then I started seeing the bank statements, seeing the money walk out of the bank. But, like anything else, you can
suspect
something, and as long as you don’t actually know for sure, there’s still a chance that it’s not the problem.

“The clues had been there. She was talking about getting in situations where she lost her fee and had to pay the other models. I had found a hypodermic needle in her things before. But I just couldn’t believe it because, as a child, if you took Gia to the doctor for a shot she’d scream bloody murder.”

Finally, when Gia returned one night from a drug shopping spree, Kathleen confronted her. “I was waiting for her when she came back,” Kathleen recalled. “That’s when we got down to the truth … and, once I finally put it all together and confronted her, it was hell from then on. That first winter, when I found out that she was into heroin, was when she was the worst about being found. I would go to New York, go to the apartment. Sometimes she would know I was coming up, other times I could get the doorman to
let me in. Sometimes I would drive up, write out the Lord’s Prayer, slip it under the door, sign it, ‘Love, Mom,’ and drive back to Richboro. There were times when Henry thought I was being unreasonable. But he knew that there was going to be no living with me if he didn’t let me do what I had to do. There was no way he was going to come between me and Gia.

“She was trying to get it together. She was at Ford’s for a couple of weeks, that didn’t work out. Then she just decided to come home and clean up.”

Gia moved back to Philadelphia on February 11, 1981. It was two weeks after her twenty-first birthday, and almost three years to the day since she had begun modeling. She moved into her mother and stepfather’s house in suburban Richboro, where she couldn’t get from her small bedroom to the kitchen without passing the family room wall that was
covered
with framed copies of her magazine covers and
Cosmo
calendar posters. Gia wanted her mother to take them down, but she wouldn’t. “Gia liked the
idea
that the covers were on the wall, but she couldn’t stand to be in the room with them,” Kathleen recalled, with the kind of solipsistic logic and maternal cluelessness that often frustrated her daughter.

The week Gia left New York,
Time
magazine ran a cover story on modeling. In a bit of corporate backslapping, the cover just happened to appear the week before the annual
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, which was published by the same parent company and was riding the swelling wave of model-oriented publicity to ever-growing newsstand sales. The
Time
story highlighted Brooke Shields on the cover, and inside had pictures of Christie Brinkley (who was about to appear on the
SI
swimsuit cover), Janice Dickinson, Carol Alt, Rachel Ward and Apollonia. Most conspicuous by their absence in the article—their names were not even mentioned—were Patti Hansen, Esme and Gia.