Thing of Beauty (16 page)

They settled on the Beautiful People, those international jet-setters from whom fashion and style were to trickle down to the masses. They were originally christened, during Jackie Kennedy’s shopping spree in the White House, by young John Fairchild, then a reporter for and heir to his family’s Seventh Avenue trade publication
Women’s Wear Daily.
The rise of the Beautiful People—or BPs, as they were shorthanded in
WWD
—seemed perfectly timed with the cult of personality journalism that was sweeping America.

The first shot in the “soft news” revolution was fired in 1974, when
Time
magazine took its “People” page—where it had always banished reports on movie and TV stars, rock groups, socialites and athletes—and turned it into the instantly successful
People
magazine. As
The Washington Post
capitalized on its newfound national profile after Watergate,
its highbrow soft news section “Style” taught newspapers how to incorporate
People’s
lessons. While
Ms.
magazine was the first mainstream feminist publication,
People
and “Style” were probably more accurate measures of media response to the women’s movement. Or perhaps they were a subconscious response to other social changes—creating a centralized system of international gossip and people-talk to replace the crumbling network of neighborhood and family chatter.

The Beautiful People filled a great many needs in the soft news revolution. And, as print and broadcast media followed the lead of
People
and “Style,” demand for celebrities increased exponentially. Eventually the traditional BPs—redefined as anyone who could actually
afford
the clothes and the lifestyle, regardless of social standing—were joined on the bandstand by their
beautifying
people.

It was a whole new world for the
fashionistas:
the army of models, photographers, designers, hair and makeup people, stylists and editors who toiled daily in the beauty trenches. The “famous non-famous people” were joining the ranks of the truly famous. And the first place where the BPs and the
fashionistas
could be seen together in public was on the global dance floor at Studio 54.

“That whole curtain just dropped,” recalled fashion illustrator Joe Eula, who had been a famous non-famous person for decades—doing elegant illustrations for all the top designers and publications—but became a celebrity in the midseventies because he was responsible for all of Halston’s preliminary sketches and fashion illustrations. “They invited us all to dinner, lunch and to sleep with them. The Studio took care of that. Suddenly they didn’t mind rubbing asses with anybody, or even the front of them according to what gender they were.”

Eula was particularly tied to the Studio scene because his apartment just happened to be right down Fifty-fourth Street from the club. “We got drugged here first, and then went up there,” he explained. “We were living in some kind of incredible … well, we were living in our own publicity world. Party and work became synonymous. It was twenty-four hours a day, no goddamn limit, never any nine-to-five. And having all these rich, international people around just
lent credence to the party. They had money. They certainly dressed the style. And all those girls needed an arm to lean on.

“It was a heyday for those social people. And the reporters were very bright. Suddenly, every night, they had something to write about. There were South Americans, there were French, the English, who had such bad pimples, and those converted liras certainly went around big. It was just another goddamn League of Nations.

“Everybody was there until late and then people split off. There was the after-hour go
drug
group, the after-hour go
gamble
group, the after-hour go down and
faggot
group, the after-hour
leather
group … always pretty much the same people.

“But it was
ours.
It was a world that had nothing to do with Europe. This whole crazy thing came out of New York. Everybody had to stay up all night. You took what you could. I personally took as many drugs and fucked as many people as possible. They did it half-assed in Europe. They never knew how to mix fags with straights in those discotheques. They were beginning to, but they didn’t know how to put it together like me and Halston and the people who made it at that time.”

“Studio was a phenomenon; every night was like a Fellini party. Everyone was there and you could do whatever you wanted there,” recalled Peter Beard, cameraman, playboy, photo-opportunist and legendary Studio regular, whose home in Montauk, Long Island, was a regular retreat for the Warhol crowd and whose home in Kenya (near
Out of Africa
author Karen Blixen’s place) was where the jet set went to get down, get dirty and touch nature. Beard’s fortieth birthday party at Studio was highlighted by a huge white elephant cake lowered from the ceiling, in honor of his famous pictures of dying wildlife. “That was the last hurrah for New York. Karen Blixen said it beautifully: ‘When the wildlife is gone, the only comparable thrill may be found in the middle of the biggest cities.’”

In May of 1977, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager had done something quite ingenuous. They took the huge, ethnic discos in the outer boroughs—like the one Rubell ran in Queens, which was similar to 2001 Odyssey, immortalized
in
Saturday Night Fever
—and crossbred them with the gay dance clubs. They established unheard of exclusivity by creating the most restrictive door policy a public place could get away with, and making sure that enough went on inside that people would wait. The club’s watershed event was Halston’s birthday party for Bianca Jagger, where she was led around on a white horse by a naked black giant rolled in gold glitter.

Once the stars started coming, Studio maintained a constant flow of celebrities (and people who looked as if they deserved celebration) by elaborate party-planning. They actively merchandised the club as a place to hold private parties and public relations events. And anyone whose presence would rate a mention in a newspaper gossip column or
People
magazine might be asked if Studio could throw them a party.

By the time Gia and Sharon got to town, Studio 54 was, to those who paid strict attention to such matters, already peaking or even slightly beyond its peak. It had already been open for a year. The best parts of its clever concept were already being copied, or rebelled against, by other clubs. Even the recently established VIP catacombs—created when Bianca, Halston and Liza Minnelli needed a dressing room to prepare for the club’s first anniversary party—were proof that mere mortals and people from New Jersey were overrunning the main entrance and the dance floor.

But the
fashionistas
had too much spiritually invested in Studio 54 to let it pass so easily: it had become the Grand Ole Opry of Style. And, besides, appearances to the contrary, the fashion business was not really in the habit of changing bandwagons when the cutting-edgers started looking for the next big thing. They were usually still responding to the
last
big thing. In the beauty-industrial complex, it took at least three months to turn
any
idea—for an editorial photograph, a piece of clothing, a nail polish—into reality. Many of the top people at the magazines, clothing manufacturers and ad agencies stopped going out dancing when they got those powerful jobs. They heard about new things before Middle America did, but often in the same way parents heard about new things: from their kids, or
somebody’s
kids.

There were a handful of New York publications that kept up with the scene at its own pace—The
Village Voice
, Andy Warhol’s
Interview
and the new nightlife rag,
Night.
But most of the fashion business was decidedly uptown and slow to respond to trends unless they could be assured that the hipness would outlast their lead times. To Seventh Avenue, where the manufacturers had their offices and showrooms, a trend wasn’t over until there was no more money to be wrung from it. There were no fortunes to be made by selling to the fringes. It was the people who followed the trendies, and those who followed the followers, who really spoke at the cash register.

So it was no surprise that fashion people were still hanging out at Studio 54. Gia’s personal taste in music tended more toward rock n’ roll than Studio’s trademark disco music. But she started going to Studio regularly, anyway: you couldn’t really expect to be a fashion model without being seen there.

“I moved to New York around the same time Gia did,” recalled John Long, “and I went to Studio with her a couple times. We liked to dance together and she used me to meet girls. It’s not easy for a girl to score other girls. She could get any man she wanted, but she said she envied me because I had a better shot of scoring with Juli Foster than she did. Juli Foster was a big Wilhelmina model at that time, and Gia had a crush on her. Gia would say, ‘Ask that girl to dance.’ Then she’d join with us and pull the girl off into a corner and buy her a beer.”

On one of her first nights at Studio 54, Gia was approached by Ara Gallant. Once among the top hairstylists in the industry, the flamboyant Gallant was now establishing himself as a photographer. His more experimental work appeared often in
Interview
, and although his conventional fashion pictures had yet to make a huge impact, he was shooting for a start-up women’s magazine called
Ambiance.
Gallant was popular with the models; he always wore a cap, for which the girls would bring him pins. He asked Gia if she would come by his studio.

Two days later, Gallant photographed her for
Ambiance.
It was her first job in New York. She arrived at nine
A.M.,
had her hair and makeup done by a professional for the first time, and modeled until five
P.M
. For this she earned $23,
which wasn’t going to do much to offset the $50 advances she had begun taking from the agency each Friday. Like all modeling jobs, it would be two months before she found out—when the magazine’s third issue was published—if the pictures were used at all and how she looked.

A week after the shooting with Ara Gallant, Gia went on a go-see to Lance Staedler’s studio. The young, excruciatingly quiet, Montana-born photographer had moved his freelance business from Chicago to New York in 1976, and was still trying to build up a clientele for his artful, seductive, black and white fashion shots. He had done an assignment for
GQ
and some advertising and catalog work, but most of the pictures he took that he really liked weren’t considered appropriate for fashion. They had an intimacy that big commercial magazines only wanted in celebrity portraits, not shots of professionally anonymous models.

“Gia came by the studio, and her hair was a mess, and all in her face,” Staedler recalled. “I asked her if she wanted to do some tests. I remember the first time I shot with her, I was doing her hair. She was looking in the makeup mirror and I was looking at her and I didn’t quite know what I was going to do. She looked at me and said, ‘Well, don’t look at
me
, I’m just some dumb girl from Philadelphia.’ She just seemed so real, not like the other models.”

During one session, Staedler heavily made up Gia’s eyes and lips, and had her remove her top and just wear his own leather bomber jacket. In each shot, she threw her hair back at a different angle and left the jacket open a little more or less. In between poses, she ate raisins from a box—he clicked off a few shots of her doing that as well. He used a mounted, rectangular camera that took 2¼-inch-square photographs: film cartridges were attached and detached from the camera body so it could be reloaded without moving it. Staedler took thirty-six shots in the first pose, and then had Gia change positions. He told her to lay down and prop herself up on one arm. As in the other shots, her breasts would be partially or even completely exposed, depending upon how far she opened the jacket. But in this pose, her bared breasts wouldn’t be as prominent and obvious: the
nudity would be more subtle and sensual. Staedler took a few shots in that position, and the session was over.

After the film was processed, Staedler sat down with the images to figure out what he had. Of the standing poses, seven frames interested him enough to try cropping them with a grease pencil and a ruler on the contact sheets. But the shots he found himself drawn to were the reclining ones. And after painstakingly editing down the images, one finally emerged.

It was a stunning photograph. The oversize prints he made of the shot drew the viewer into the folds of the jacket, the shiny sweep of hair, and a pair of sadly seductive eyes. It was the kind of shot that would stop even the most jaded photographer as he hurriedly paged through yet another model portfolio, or the most harried magazine reader leafing through five hundred pages of pretty girls. It was easily the strongest picture anyone had ever taken of Gia. When Staedler showed it to her, she immediately asked to see the contact sheets. “I had gotten into the habit of not showing contact sheets,” Staedler recalled. “The contact sheet is just so free, you see everything. I want people just to see what I was working towards, not everything it took to get what I wanted. She got really upset that I wouldn’t show them to her.”

But even in her upset, Gia was smart enough to know what to do with the shot he
did
show her. She walked it over to Mann and Green Color lab on East Forty-third and had copies made for her portfolios—the more calls that came in requesting a model’s book, the more duplicate books she needed. And she had a hundred Xeroxes made for whoever she thought should have one.

It was the kind of picture that could make a model’s career. “I remember when Gia’s book came into the studio,” said Sean Byrnes, longtime assistant of photographer Francesco Scavullo. “I stole that black and white picture and sent the book back. I never did that
ever
before. I finally met Gia when she came around the studio to get the photo back.”