Thing of Beauty (21 page)

The first shooting Gia had to do was editorial shots of Andrea Odicini’s collection. According to
WWD
, the collection included “several easy-to-wear shapes … these are clothes that women who admire the French couture will buy.” According to Chris von Wangenheim, the collection ranged from passable to unwearable, so something besides the clothes would have to make the photographs interesting.

Gia had done nothing to hide her crush on Juli Foster, a rising model who had been discovered a year earlier while waiting tables in a restaurant near the Wilhelmina office, and had also been brought to Rome by
Bazaar.
Von Wangenheim, who had always been interested in homoerotic themes, decided to use the energy between the two models to his advantage. He improvised a series of photographs in a Grand Hotel suite that amounted to a lesbian seduction sequence.

In the first shot, Juli Foster looked longingly at the camera while Gia looked longingly at her: from that angle, the two dark-haired girls almost appeared to be twins. In the second, Gia washed Juli’s hair—carefully, since they were both dressed in crepe tunic tops and lace skirts—in the tub of one of the Grand Hotel’s exquisite bathrooms. In the third shot Juli, fully dressed and sitting on a bed, reached for a nude Gia emerging from behind a dressing screen. Gia’s outfit, which all agreed looked better on a hanger than on a human being, dangled from the screen: Juli’s high heel was pressed deep into Gia’s naked hip. And in the last shot, Juli and Gia, wearing only high heels, appeared to be about to kiss. Juli’s hand was over Gia’s breast and their eyes were locked.

On Monday, the same clothes were photographed for
groupage
by Patrick Demarchelier, with Gia, Kim Alexis and several other models. Demarchelier was a bearish,
bearded Frenchman who spoke little English. He was also one of the few up-and-coming New York-based photographers who was married. For that reason, among others, he had a reputation for being more businesslike than his colleagues and less experimental. Demarchelier shot the models drinking bottles and bottles of champagne, buzzily flirting and playing with the hotel waiters in the restaurant. In the evening, Gia did a series of beauty shots with Von Wangenheim.

On Tuesday, Gia was shot by Arthur Elgort for a feature that could have been called “girls of the
alta moda.”
The theme of the series was the models
Bazaar
had brought to work the collections: one picture per girl, but with her name and some biographical information in the caption. Such attention to the identities of the models was rare in fashion magazines. Models were the only major people involved in a sitting who did not regularly get a credit (except for the fashion editors, who were generally magazine staff members). For the model, the picture itself was considered the credit. But the use of the model’s name (American
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
occasionally gave “worn by” credits) was becoming more important as
public
recognition of models began to grow and matter: a trend that editors, photographers and art directors found somewhat disconcerting.

“I remember being in Rome with Christie Brinkley on a Chris von Wangenheim trip for
Vogue Patterns
,” recalled art director Marc Balet. “We were sitting on a hillside and these girls came up to Christie and they
knew her name
. I remember being so shocked that somebody knew a model’s name. It was so
unbelievable
to me.”

Bazaar
ended up using Elgort shots of eleven models, most of whom were destined for major careers. Kelly Emberg graced the opening spread, followed by Nancy Donahue, one of the industry’s new brassy blondes, and Shaun Casey. The next spreads included Lise Ryall, Donna Sexton, Michelle Stevens, Kim Charlton, Juli Foster and Gia—who was described in her caption as “aggressive and perfect.”

On Wednesday, Gia worked with Demarchelier again, this time to produce a
groupage
for designer Andre Laug. The simple, straightforward shots were churned out quickly and efficiently, since the designer was standing right on the set
watching everything, and everyone had a seven-thirty plane to catch to Paris. There they checked into the Hotel Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli, just across from the Tuileries Gardens and down the street from the Louvre. The eighteenth-century hotel, with its salons copied from Versailles, its celestial-ceilinged lounge and its historic Suite 108 (once occupied by the deposed king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, and now housing Salvador Dalí) was a gilty pleasure of French excess.

In Rome, it was easy for Italian
Bazaar
to get its pick of the clothes to photograph. Not all the magazines bothered to cover the
alta moda
, and even
WWD
only covered the Valentino show grandly: the other designers were relegated to a small, page 11 roundup story. Paris was another matter. Every magazine covered the
haute couture
, and access to the one-of-a-kind garments—some of which were hurriedly stitched together just before the model was pushed down the runway—was fiercely contested.
Bazaar
was pretty far down in the pecking order, so Lizzette Kattan and her crew of imported
fashionistas
got the clothes very late at night, if at all. This was tough on photographers like Arthur Elgort, who liked to shoot in available light, and fine with Chris von Wangenheim, who preferred to photograph late at night.

Von Wangenheim took Gia and model Regine—who bore a striking resemblance to Wilhelmina Cooper—out into the Paris night to shoot a handful of pieces from the well-received collections by Yves St. Laurent (whose “high chic” theme had set the tone for the week) and Marc Bohan for Christian Dior. Once again, Von Wangenheim chose a highly suggestive lesbian theme. The opener showed Gia and Regine in an alleyway lit from behind by car lights. Gia was playing the coquettish fem, her gown pulled down to expose one shoulder, while Regine looked the butch seductress—or as butch as one could look in a Dior blazer, slacks and a satin top. The other spreads were variations on the theme with Gia and Regine posing on the Rue di Rivoli, staring longingly into each other’s eyes.

After three days in Paris,
Bazaar
brought a smaller group back to Milan to shoot what was left. With French photographer Jacques Malignon, Gia and Juli Foster spent several days doing a twelve-page
groupage
for Lancetti. In the evenings,
the group went out to sample Milan, Lizzette and Peponi’s home turf: to dine at fashionable restaurants like Torre di Pisa and dance at clubs like Nepentha, the Milanese version of Studio 54.

Milan was Italy’s necessary evil: a crowded, cosmopolitan city where daily executive work could actually be accomplished. For that reason it was often overlooked by tourists—who, if they came at all, came for a day or two to shop and visit the Duomo and Da Vinci’s crumbling “The Last Supper”—and scoffed at by those Italians who didn’t need to do business there. But Milan (or
Milano)
was, much more than Rome, the place where fledgling fashion people lived. Most of Italy’s magazines were based in Milan, as was its growing ready-to-wear industry: the manufacturers had recently moved their twice-yearly collections to Milan from Florence. Milan was one of Italy’s most expensive cities, but it was still far cheaper than Paris or London, and offered easier train access to jobs all over Europe than Rome did.

Because of its growing popularity, Milan was developing a local economy for fledgling
fashionistas
from around the world. It had a number of
pensioni, residencias
and
albergi
(each an official Italian government designation for small places of lodging) that were becoming known as “model hotels”: places where every room was filled with photographers, models, designers and stylists waiting for a big break. Among the first model hotels were Arena, where Anjelica Huston stayed, and the legendary Residence Clothilde, where everyone from Gianni Versace through Brigitte Nielsen lived while trying to break into the business. The owner of one model hotel became so familiar with her role as surrogate mother and business adviser that she opened her own agency, called Why Not?

It was while staying at the small hotels that models made friends before they had to worry if people were being nice to them just because they were famous. Milan tested a model’s resolve, let her know what she was getting into. It was an experience that the last few generations of girls shared: sitting in their crowded
pensione
room, waiting for a photographer or agent to call, dreaming of a sitting for
Linnea Italiana
that might lead to a bigger Italian magazine and maybe, in a year or two, a shot at American
Vogue.

Gia’s quick rise had excluded her from that entire experience. She had come to Milan a success. The eighteen-year-old was by no means a supermodel, but she had vaulted over the barriers that held back ninety-five percent of the young women who wanted to be models. The new way of thinking in the modeling business was that this type of meteoric rise was good fortune. The old way of thinking—to which nobody dared admit lest they be branded unmodern—was that starving in Milan or Paris or New York was probably good for a model-in-training. It never hurt to know how many other “prettiest girls in town” there really were. Without taking the ladder rung by rung, it wasn’t always possible to understand the modeling business for what it really was: very glamorous at the top, lucratively tedious in the middle and pathetically sleazy at the bottom.

And modeling was
extremely
bottom-heavy—perhaps even more than professional athletics, to which it was often compared. There were some other important differences between athletes and models, as well. Athletes could develop, both mentally and physically, and they could enhance performance with wisdom as some of their natural gifts faded. It was nearly impossible for a model to get much
better
at what she did, and career longevity was not only unlikely but
programmed to be impossible.
And a model’s hour under the strobe wasn’t the same as an athlete’s moment in the sun: it lacked that essential heroism, the burst of pride in reached potential.

Even in the pony leagues, a home run was a home run and the moment could be transcendent. But even at the highest echelon of modeling, it was always a job. Because you looked the way you did, a lot of people you didn’t know would do anything to sleep with you. Your job was to encourage those feelings, allow that encouragement to sell products and draw a commission from the earning power of the tease. Athletes got paid to play a game they loved: models got paid to play a game that some of them could tolerate, and the rest simply loathed. Professional athletics could be a career; modeling was, even for the top girls, almost always a
phase
to be survived.

Gia left Milan on Friday, August 4, flying to Frankfurt and changing planes for New York. Since the
Bazaar
all
expenses-paying ended with her return air ticket, she paid for the twenty-dollar cab ride from JFK to Manhattan herself, scribbling down the amount in the expense record section of her Wilhelmina datebook—a practice she had been told would help her at tax time if she paid careful attention to it. When she returned home, she also spent some time on the kind of visual bookkeeping that many models did.

In a Wilhelmina book with blank pages, she pasted some of the pictures she had collected on her trip. Most of them were Polaroids: photographers generally took a number of test Polaroids before shooting on print film, saving several for the client and distributing the others as gifts, mementos. These became the artifacts created by each job for those who actually did the work. When the shooting was over, the Polaroids were the only real evidence of the day’s labor. The pictures themselves still had to be developed, and they usually were owned by the client anyway. The Polaroids were the instant gratification, and they belonged to whoever they were bestowed upon.

The more compulsive
fashionistas
pasted the Polaroids directly into the date books they carried with them everywhere: others kept separate books. For these models, stylists and editors, the pictures were a way to jog a memory that a notation like “Paris, Dior show” didn’t sufficiently describe.

Italian
Bazaar’s
Lizzette Kattan put her pictures right in her regular datebook, a practice she had begun as a Ford model. For July 26, she pasted a Polaroid of Patrick Demarchelier, Gia and the crew on the Andre Laug shots. For July 28, she pasted a Polaroid of Peponi leering at the nude shots of Gia in
Bazaar
, and another of Gia holding a picture of Peponi. Gia had written “I love you both” underneath one of the shots.

Gia started pasting her Polaroids, one to a page, in a separate book. She also scribbled down, on a page further in, some of the phone numbers and addresses she had picked up in Europe. These were European agents to call the next time she was in Rome or Paris and wanted to drum up extra work. Someone at Dior wanted to see her the next time she was in for the collections. Lizzette Kattan wanted her to have her private numbers in New York and Milan, and Mr. Della Schiava’s home numbers in Milan and at his island
retreat on Capri. Peponi’s castle was where the
Bazaar
crowd went for vacation. In the traditional European style, they took off the entire month of August.

Because they had grown fond of Gia, Lizzette and Peponi invited her to join them on Capri if her schedule allowed. The invitation would, of course, include all of her travel expenses. It all sounded a little more elaborate than what she had planned for her vacation. She was supposed to spend Labor Day week in Atlantic City with her friends from Philly. It was the traditional end-of-summer ritual for Philadelphians—topped off by the Miss America pageant—and it was being made more interesting by the recent opening of Atlantic City’s first casino, Resorts International. The casino was reshaping many opinions about the shore town: Gia’s father was planning to sell out his Philadelphia holdings and move his entire operation to the Boardwalk area.