Thing of Beauty (39 page)

R
ochelle Rosen* was aggressively ambivalent. She wasn’t sure if she loved or hated her family, so she did both. She wasn’t sure what gender she preferred, so she slept with a lot of men and a lot of women. She wasn’t sure which drugs she liked best, so she did a lot of everything. She wasn’t sure if she was basically good or basically bad. Those who knew her weren’t sure either.

Rochelle Rosen was a smart-mouthed Philadelphia college student, petite with dirty-blonde hair, who came from money and had always been the one in any group who was in the most trouble. Her mother had given birth to her at age seventeen, with her father still an undergraduate in college, and they had lived with the Rosens’ wealthy grandparents for Rochelle’s first five years. When she began getting into trouble in high school—eventually being sent for a short stay in a rehab hospital, which she recalled as “more a way of getting away from my parents than anything else”—she was sent back to live with her grandmother. Her younger sister, who fulfilled enough of her parents’ expectations for both daughters, remained at home. The move had not changed Rochelle’s lifestyle much, and she fondly remembered being caught laying out several thousand Quaaludes on the Persian rug in her bedroom in her grandmother’s apartment: “She looked in and said, ‘Clean this stuff up and vacuum that carpet.’ I loved my grandmother.”

As a student at Temple University, Rochelle had become a regular in both the gay and straight dance clubs, traveling easily between the sons of Philadelphia’s rich and powerful and the daughters of the sexual revolution. The club of the moment was called Second Story, a city church that been converted and now fancied itself the Studio 54 of Philadelphia. A number of the guys Rochelle knew from Second Story had famous fathers, written up in
The Philadelphia Inquirer
business section or the Pennsylvania State Crime Commission Report. Such a combo-platter peer group was a common situation for a girl on the Philadelphia club scene. Just like in New York, where preppies slummed in the same places where the strivers strove and the hip looked down their perfect noses, Philadelphia nightlife had become a real melting pot. WASP kids and ethnic kids, rich kids and poor kids found that, unlike their parents, they had something in common: they were all queued up for the same lines of cocaine. Since everyone was, technically, breaking the law, the lines between “good” and “bad” people became—like everything else—awfully blurry.

“Without getting into any names, okay, let’s just say I knew some people from South Philadelphia and Cherry Hill who were involved with organized crime,” Rochelle recalled. “There was this one guy … he’s dead now, so, what can he do? He used to pay me to round up girls from Second Story and bring them back to his house to have parties. The club would let out about four and I would go in just before that. I used to take his Mercedes and go downtown and pick them out of there and bring them back to the house. He knew that I wouldn’t be involved with him, but I would get him the girls and he would give me, like, a hundred dollars for each girl I could get back there. And they were freebasing. He was into that. In fact, he had boats that came to Florida and he’d go there and bring
so much coke back.

“It was mostly just drugs. Well, no, they were into all that, like, weird sex, group sex, too. But, well, I never got really into it because I was really gay, so I didn’t even want to be with
one
guy, let alone six. So I always got my drugs and got out. Oh, my god, I was so
bad,
then. I was so
young!”

Gia had met Rochelle very casually in Philadelphia the
previous summer. “We were introduced by a friend of mine who had modeled with her at Gimbels,” Rochelle recalled. “She walked in with Gia, who was wearing a black motorcycle jacket, a white T-shirt, blue Levis and white hi-top Cons—that was before that was stylish—and she had a Heineken in her hand. I almost passed out. I was going through the dilemma of sex at that time, and I had never come into contact with anybody who was that stereotypically homosexual. Then, after meeting her, I walked into Green’s Drug Store and there was a stack of
Cosmopolitans
and I looked, and it was that girl who was in my house. You could see it was her face. The whole thing just turned my head, and I’m not the kind of person who’s easily awed.

“When we met she had already been taking heroin and had been through twenty-one-day detox. She had what they call a ‘bubblegum habit’ because she was able to detox in twenty-one days. She was getting Percodans or Percocets from some dentist. If you try to stop doing heroin, you can take Percodan and it’ll give you the same high and won’t hurt you. Then the dentist cut her off and she went to the vitamin shot guy—she
loved
those mainlined vitamins—I think he gave her Percocets and Valiums, too. She was trying to stay clean.”

When Gia moved back to her mother’s house in Richboro, she started seeing more of Rochelle—who bore some physical resemblance to Sandy Linter. Kathleen was unconcerned about Gia and Rochelle at first, believing that they were just friends. Then she began to realize that they were lovers. And she also suspected that Rochelle was not a likely candidate for the role of the strong, level-headed companion who would inspire Gia to stay clean and help her get back to the modeling career waiting in New York.

The fashion world was going on without Gia. She was one of the few girls with a look that was considered irreplaceable: there were a lot more blondes waiting on deck than brunettes who could do high fashion. But being irreplaceable didn’t mean you wouldn’t be replaced—it wasn’t as if the collections were going to halt if she was unavailable, or
Vogue
would run blank pages. No one person was ever that important in the
fashionista
world. The jobs were more important
than the people who did them: the decision to create something—a photograph, an advertisement, a garment, a perfume, a career—was more important than what was actually created.

Still, individual players did matter—to each other. Each person was just a cog in the machinery, but it took only one or two connections to get inside the machine and a few more to stay inside it. Gia had already lost her first mentor in New York when Wilhelmina died. But that was more a personal loss than a professional one. A top model could always get another agent, and a lot of what an agent gave a model came in the beginning of her career.

But losing favor with a top photographer who liked working with you and generated a lot of jobs could cost a model a lot of money. If the photographer was a friend, it could cost the model even more. Gia had already burned bridges with a lot of New York’s top photographers. Professionally and personally, she couldn’t really afford to lose any of her remaining fashion business friends. Her chances for a comeback were directly related to how many of the same people who had encouraged her rise were still in place to rejoice in her second coming.

Chris von Wangenheim went on vacation to St. Martin with his girlfriend in early March, a trip meant to put the last grueling year of his life behind him. He had been going through a divorce that had become messy both emotionally and professionally. He was a fairly traditional European man and did not really believe in divorce, especially since there was a child involved. He had also been working on a book for St. Martin’s Press for years—a project that might finally elevate him above the throng of high-paid commercial shutterbugs—but his wife, retired Ford model Regine Jaffey, was refusing to let him use some of his best photographs. Regine had been Von Wangenheim’s favorite model, but he had never bothered to get releases from her for pictures of herself or their child.

The emotional strain, and Von Wangenheim’s increasing use of cocaine, had decimated his career. He had lost ad clients—first Versace, and now Dior was about to give the American licensee campaign to Avedon. And his edgier editorial clients were abandoning him. He had even parted
company with the
dolce vita
crew at Italian
Bazaar,
after spending a few paid weeks in Capri and then proclaiming himself unable to take even one picture. “By that time he was snorting cocaine every five minutes,” said Lizzette Kattan.

“I’ve never seen anybody so totally undone,” recalled fine art photographer Ralph Gibson, a friend of Von Wangenheim’s who had also copublished, in 1980, the art book
Fashion: Theory,
which included essays and photographs by Von Wangenheim and seven other top fashion photographers. “I just watched the unraveling, the unfurling of a great person. He had moments of brilliance, but he was totally cynical about the commercial world, in a German aristocratic way. I mean, it was something he scraped off the bottom of his shoe most of the time. But he was running such a big overhead, he had to keep scraping.

“What happens is that fashion photographers make it solely on their inspiration, which is then leeched out of them. Very few of them stay inspired. When you’re really hot, you make this particular photograph for yourself, whether anybody would buy it or not. And that’s how they all get their foot in the door, and get their names known—because it’s inspired work. We all know what inspired everything is. It has a peculiar perfume about it. It is instantly scented. Well, then what happens is that people come along and start to dampen the enthusiasm through rejection: the work gets rejected, gets cut in half, it gets abused and then it’s purely a survival situation. And many photographers don’t continue to grow under that.

“Once you’re established, you can coast for a long time. I know for a fact that Von Wangenheim was definitely in need of a major resurgence of inspiration. And his divorce was fucking him up terribly.”

Von Wangenheim and his wife had reached an unhappy but final arrangement. He had brainstormed a new approach for his book with Marc Balet, the third art director to try to make the project work. They would use the theme
Women Alone
and Von Wangenheim would take lots of new pictures to mix in with the best of the past—including several shots of Gia. The photographer had gone to St. Martin
with renewed hope for his life and his photographic career: he was going to take pictures down there, and recharge.

But he had also left a makeshift will. He scribbled it down in twenty minutes and handed it to his flabbergasted friend, downtown fine art photographer John Flattau. He gave it to him along with the key to his loft/studio, since Flattau had agreed to check Von Wangenheim’s mail while he was away.

On March 10, Flattau went over to his friend’s place to sort the mail. After finishing, he went to lock the loft’s heavy double door. The key snapped off in the lock. When Flattau returned to his own apartment, he received a phone call. Chris von Wangenheim had been killed in a single-car crash on St. Martin. His girlfriend had survived.

“It was a total shock, but in no way mysterious,” recalled Ralph Gibson. “And when he died,
everything
he did died with him. Some guys are better set up for posterity than Von Wangenheim was, absolutely. He hadn’t set up his archives or anything like that, because as young as he was, he didn’t think he needed one. I, on the other hand, have long since set mine up. I could be dead ten years and people will still think I’m alive, the way I could leak work out.”

Von Wangenheim’s death was another tragedy for the business and a terrible personal loss for Gia. But it did not seem like an isolated incident—just a particularly gruesome symptom of a socioeconomic disease that was turning the glitzy, Studio 54 disco-world of the
fashionistas
into an endless night of decadence at the Mudd Club. The week after the photographer’s death,
New York
magazine did another of its semiannual Anthony Haden-Guest cover stories on the modeling business. “The Spoiled Supermodels” detailed a purported client and photographer revolt over rising model prices and power. The agencies were compared to OPEC and photographers were encouraged to vent about the outrage of sessions being canceled because a certain
model
(rather than a certain
photographer)
was unavailable. The article also delivered to the general public the litany of model horror stories that had been privately circulating through the industry for the past year.

Since the author was using pseudonyms, composite characters, and probably apocryphal stories, the identities of the
two most prominently portrayed offenders, “Leandra” and “Cleo,” were unclear. Cleo was identified as a heroin addict with a “model-chaser boyfriend” who left shoots to meet her drug dealer and jumped into the Grand Canal in Venice during a TV commercial shooting. Leandra reportedly arrived to a sitting “grumpy and extremely late … [with] filthy feet and bitten nails” and proceeded to sweep the makeup jars, brushes and tubes onto the floor and tear a designer dress “in half.” When Haden-Guest said that the last time he had seen Cleo was “in one of those after-hours joints that open at about five, after the rock clubs have started shutting down … her skin was blueish-pale like milk in a dark pantry,” he left little doubt that Gia was at least part of his composite character of the model from hell.

The New York
Daily News
was also about to publish a week-long series on “the dark side of modeling” called “Night Face Day Face.” Its highlights were a thorough accounting of Esme’s rise and fall—about which only Esme herself seemed unaware—and a heartbreaking profile of Lisa Taylor, whose wrist had been so beautifully bitten by Chris von Wangenheim’s Doberman. At twenty-eight, Taylor was going public about why her career was in shambles, destroyed by substance abuse and what she said was a self-destructive relationship with actor Tommy Lee Jones, whom she had met during the filming of
Eyes of Laura Mars.
Taylor said that cocaine was the main culprit: it made her paranoid and she would often be sitting in her apartment all alone when “suddenly, I’d think there were five thousand people standing around me trying to take my picture. I’d actually look around to see if they were there.”

She went from cocaine to drinking a lot of martinis. Her weight fell nearly ten pounds and she was terribly depressed, but she found that her editorial work actually picked up during that awful period. “There was one photograph that Helmut Newton did of me for
Vogue
that I begged them not to use but they used it anyway,” she said. “It was me in a sauna with just a towel over my lap, holding a huge ladle with the water dripping into my mouth. I looked
awful,
but it was beautiful, you know, as a photograph. I wasn’t smiling, my hair was standing straight out and was all greasy, but it was beautiful.”