Thing of Beauty (56 page)

“Look, I have no doubt Gia was gay. Why would somebody want to live a life that is not easy to live in this society, put up with so much abuse, live in fear? Who in their right mind would do that if they didn’t
have to?
I know people that have been sexually abused that are still straight. Their relationships have put a strain on them, they need therapy. But I don’t think abuse
makes
somebody gay.”

One gay counselor who worked with Gia felt differently about her sexuality. “I think her gayness was almost a reaction and I don’t know if it was a true gayness,” he said. “There are some people … well, I have a female friend who I used to be
engaged
to, so you have to be careful of labeling yourself gay. I have lesbian friends who there is no question about—their identity and affection is at that end of the Kinsey scale. Gia would have taken affection from
anybody.
It’s hard to see in this setting, but I don’t know that she got from
women
what she wanted either. Gia reminded me of a Push-Me-Pull-You. A dance-away lover—when she gets close to somebody she dances away. She had love-hate relationships.”

Gia was able to get some medical information from the local AIDS task force and asked Rob to go to some peer counseling for friends of AIDS victims. She had less luck getting mental health help for herself. A counselor from Eagleville tried to refer Gia to the best female psychiatrist she knew.

“She refused to see Gia because she was HIV-positive,” recalled the counselor. “She didn’t want to have that slip out and get to her other patients. She told me that the research and stuff about AIDS was being minimized. She was afraid of Gia using her bathroom and shit like that. What could I tell Gia? She was so depressed, she wanted to see somebody. I told her that the psychiatrist’s caseload was full and I talked to her when she called me at home.”

Gia was able to get some counseling at a mental health center in Norristown. But her counselor there, though sympathetic and dedicated, was untrained in counseling AIDS patients. She did not realize that Gia was terminally ill.

“It was my understanding that she had been diagnosed with ARC,” recalled the counselor. “I didn’t know that meant she would die. To be honest, I didn’t think she
was
going to die. I kept telling her, ‘You have ARC, you don’t have AIDS.’ She said, ‘I don’t care if you say I have ARC, I’m gonna die.’ She wanted to deal with death issues. As a therapist, I was not really listening to what she was telling me. Here I was encouraging Gia to feel better and she was dying. We weren’t at odds, but I was hoping for the best and she was doomed in what she knew was going to happen.

“I had spoken to a psychiatrist who specialized in people diagnosed with AIDS or ARC, and spoke to Gia about joining the support group. But she felt it would be all men. She had a great issue with the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot for women with AIDS. She felt isolated. She had no comrades, and she felt very awkward and alone and
marked
in terms of having this disease.” At that time, fewer than 750 women in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS, and fewer than 1,900 internationally. Women made up less than seven percent of the world’s AIDS patient population.

“She looked like an old lady, she looked terrible,” the therapist recalled. “Her skin was wrinkled, she sort of hobbled around. Later she started walking with a cane. She
shook, she was just sick. Drugs were still an issue with her. She was committed to not doing them anymore, but she still had her works in her house, and she had some heroin residue. She would spend time looking at the works and looking at the residue. She was really going through a grieving process of saying good-bye to heroin. She went through a ritual of slowly letting go of the heroin addiction and, in a sense, almost had a burial. Eventually she threw everything away, and she was angry at the drug. She told me that she thought she got AIDS through heroin.

“Gia had good insight. She understood a lot of her problems. That’s what makes someone so troubled, so interesting. An individual who has more than just
the behavior,
but has some insight and psychological depth to go with it makes for a more in-depth experience—for the therapist, too. But if you don’t translate that depth into behavioral changes, it means nothing.

“I met her when her health was failing. Her physical limitations were so great that her psychological understanding was more in line with her behavior. I saw her in a unique position, because she
couldn’t
do what she used to do. She thought of herself as wild. A lot of the wildness was driven by how she felt about herself. It drove her to get attention from her mother and she did excessive behavior intentionally to get attention.”

By this point, Gia had decided that she and Rochelle had no place in each other’s lives. Rochelle disagreed with Gia’s decision. At the depths of her own drug craziness, Rochelle was continually calling and writing. Gia felt she was being harassed. She was dying and, frankly, making peace with Rochelle was low on her list of priorities.

“The biggest thing she was trying to put to rest was her relationship with her mother,” the therapist said. “She was
desperately
trying to find the good in it.”

On August 6, 1986, Way Bandy was booked to do a session at Scavullo’s studio. He arrived so exhausted—delirious, really—that the models had to do their own makeup. Scavullo was only partially astonished by the makeup artist’s uncharacteristic professional lapse. Helen Murray—who had bounced from Calvin Klein to scouting models for Wilhelmina
to agenting, and was currently representing Bandy—had called the studio ahead of time to say that he would be late. She also told Scavullo, “Way is sick”—by then the industry code-words for AIDS. The photographer was horrified and frightened.

“My first instinct was not to let him in my apartment, and then I thought, ‘You bastard,’” Scavullo recalled. “So I took him up and massaged him and gave him tea, and gave him love and support … And I’m glad I did. My first instinct was to run. Thank God the better half of me came through.”

The next day,
Vogue
editor Grace Mirabella arranged for Bandy to speak with her husband, a surgeon at Sloan-Kettering, who convinced the makeup artist—who hadn’t seen a medical doctor in years, preferring natural cures—to check into New York Hospital. He was first put into a tiny room, but Bandy’s friends conspired to pull strings. It turned out that Maury Hopson had done the head nurse’s hair for her wedding nineteen years before. Bandy got a suite overlooking the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. And on August 13, while listening to Maria Callas sing the third act of
Tosca
on his cassette player, Way Bandy died.

One of his last dying acts was to ask Hopson and Murray to make sure that his cause of death was accurately identified in his obituaries. He had been upset by the way Perry Ellis, and his company, Manhattan Industries, continued to deny the designer’s cause of death. Bandy wanted to assure that the end of his career in the ephemeral craft of makeup would have a more lasting impact.

In the spirit of his request, Bandy’s obituary was not only accurate, but Murray, Hopson and Scavullo granted interviews with a number of journalists to make even more public the death of this very private man. Bandy had been one of the best-known, openly gay men in the world, but had never spoken out about AIDS or even associated himself publicly with AIDS causes because of fear of how it would affect his career. In death, he became the first gay man to publicly share—with the gay and straight worlds—not just the fact of AIDS-diagnosis, as Rock Hudson had, but the panic of AIDS-paranoia and the horror of AIDS-death.

His posthumous openness also gave the nation a sterling example of just how irrational people who knew better could
be about the disease. When obituaries pointed out that Bandy had made up Nancy Reagan for a
Harper’s Bazaar
session with Scavullo four months before his death—the pictures were about to appear in the magazine’s September “10 Most Beautiful Women” feature—the White House announced that Bandy hadn’t really
touched
the First Lady that much. “Maybe he was with her fifteen minutes,” Nancy Reagan’s press secretary explained to a
Washington Post
reporter. “She uses very little makeup … She had seen the obit in the paper and was surprised and sorry. She knows there was nothing more than a handshake. And we’ve all been told by the medical community that you can’t contract the disease that way.”

Bandy’s friends expressed their outrage over the White House statement—“Unfuckingbelievable,” Murray told one reporter. “How dare she say that? It must have taken him forty-five minutes to an hour to put her face on, and overall, Way and Francesco had to have been there for four or five hours.” They also used the media window of opportunity caused by Bandy’s death to publicly air what life in the previously fast lane had been reduced to.

Bandy’s health fanaticism apparently had been pushed into high gear as the AIDS crisis forced the world’s gay communities into reevaluating their lifestyles. Hopson told a reporter that both he and Bandy had a “running crazy period” but in 1984, the two, who had never been lovers, both decided to become celibate. “It’s a very barren life when you don’t have sex,” Hopson explained They also went on strict macrobiotic diets, which were said to build up immune systems. Still, they were fearful, both of the disease—which felled Bandy’s ex-lover, novelist Michael Gardine, in 1985—and the growing antigay backlash. Hopson admitted they had been scared away from public association with AIDS-related causes for fear of destroying their considerable careers.

“There was one model,” recalled Hopson, “who horrified most people in the industry because she refused to have any male homosexual do her makeup. Then she called up Way for a makeup lesson, and was going to have the company pay him to teach her how to do her own makeup for the jobs. Well, ha, ha, ha. I’d really like to rub her nose in it
today. Oh, God, how funny. She calls Way! He refused to give her the makeup lesson, by the way.”

Hopson and Murray discussed how Bandy’s eccentricities had prevented him from admitting his physical deterioration or asking for help. In his last months, he was portrayed as a man trapped by his own mystique. When his doctor asked why he had avoided treatment, he said he had taken on “a Greta Garbo existence.”

“One sad thing is, once the rumors started to fly around about Way,” recalled Murray, “part of me knew that his career, for all practical purposes, was probably over. True. People
loved
talking about it Even if he had come out of the hospital with good, old-fashioned pneumonia, the [AIDS label] would have hung over his head. That’s what’s so disgusting, the stigma. And the people who were doing most of the talking were people who didn’t even know Way … people on the fringes of the business.”

On August 14, Gia wrote a letter to her Aunt Nancy that she never mailed:

Dear Nancy, I hope your fine & every thing’s OK. As you know I won’t be seeing Dodekins [Rochelle] it isn’t any good between us it hasn’t been for me since I went into Eagleville. I told her but she didn’t hear me. I love her but don’t want to be her lover or anyone else’s. The Boys are as bad as the girls.

I miss Barbara terribly. She’s always on my mind I always told people how funny she was. I wonder if she knew how much I loved her. My Mom said she did.

My friend Way died today. I upset about him he helped me get jobs went first moved to NYC. I used to have a blast working together. He made me a bracelet I still have it He was amazing if he wasn’t gay I would have try to marry him. Death makes life seem unreal Unreal in the sence that you can’t hold onto it When I was in the Mental Ward the last time I was lying in my bed and I kept imagining Rod Sterling coming through
doorway saying little about another dimension, in another time. I am falling asleep …

Bandy’s death also hurt Gia for other reasons. “She was upset that when Way died, nobody called her,” recalled Rob Fay. “All the people who claimed to be her friends. I think that when Way died she realized that she wasn’t as important as she had come to think she was. I think that’s when she realized that a lot of it was bullshit and people who said they cared didn’t care.

“I think when he died she also knew it was comin’ for her.”

Although Gia had days when her strength seemed almost normal, she had just as many when she was completely debilitated. “I was talking to her on the phone one night,” recalled Dawn Phillips, “and she was having trouble talking. After we said good-bye, it took her fifteen minutes to hang up that phone. She was in bed, she wasn’t near the receiver, and since I usually wait for the other person to hang up, I waited. I could hear her struggling to hang it up, she was in pain. It was like fifteen minutes—I looked at the clock. At one point I even tried calling out to see if she was okay. She eventually hung it up, but I knew how bad she was at that point.”

It was her physical deterioration that caused rumors to circulate among her old friends in the clubs. The rumors were started after she came out of Warminster, when she went into Center City to get her hair cut by Maurice Tannenbaum. The former Mr. Maurice had himself come full circle. He spent four years doing commercial photography in New York, followed by six months in Europe trying to get more artful, more editorial work. Disgusted, he returned to Philadelphia, took a masters in photography and did some hair out of his house. Finally, he opened his own salon in Center City.

“She came in and she had lost about fifty percent of her hair,” Maurice recalled. “It was the first time I had seen her in a while. She was obviously sick. In fact, I actually started hearing about two months before she died that she was dead.”

Her living situation at home was not altogether peaceful.
Her older brother Joey, who lived in Atlantic City with his wife and their two children (she was pregnant with her third), was out of work and spending time at his mother’s house over the summer finishing her basement. At the same time, Joey’s first wife had moved back from California with their eleven-year-old daughter, taken up residence in Atlantic City and gotten involved in a lifestyle that had the family in an uproar.