Thing of Beauty (24 page)

“And she said, ‘But it
is.
I don’t care. Who’s he?’”

Scavullo was shooting with the team that did most of the
Cosmo
covers with him: Way Bandy, and hairstylist Harry King, who Gia hadn’t met before. King had developed a reputation in his native Britain during the early seventies before moving to New York in 1974. He had quickly become one of the top cutters in Manhattan, and was working with all the top photographers. It was unclear whether King was demonstrably superior to the other top stylists whose names filled the credits in the magazines. And without those credits, it was nearly impossible to tell a Scavullo picture with a
Harry King hairstyle from one taken on a day when King was unavailable. But King had been the beneficiary of the Scavullo publicity machine just as Way Bandy had. They were the integral hair and makeup artists who comprised Francesco’s team.

Gia had a toothache the day of the session, but it still went well.
Cosmo
liked the pictures and Scavullo booked her again two weeks later for another cover try. The first one had been more a test than anything else. This second one was for real. The picture had a good chance of being used, and she got a voucher for the standard
Cosmo
cover fee, which was $100.

In the meantime, the first issue of American
Vogue
with Gia’s photographs in it had come out: a beauty shot by Elgort, fur shots by Stan Malinowski, and
Vogue Patterns
shots by Andrea Blanche. Any appearance in
Vogue
made an immediate impact. The magazine’s monthly circulation was about one million but its “pass-along rate”—the number of people who read each issue printed—was among the highest in the industry. If a hairdresser’s name was credited, his or her salon generally saw an increase in new clients asking for appointments—almost all of them wanting their hair to look just like the picture. In salons across the country, other haircutters were brought the picture and asked to duplicate the cut. A photo credit generally brought a photographer new editorial and advertising clients, many of whom were looking for something just like what they had seen in
Vogue.
If an article of clothing was shown, its sales often increased in the stores that carried it: clothes that resembled the garment were also likely to sell more briskly.

Because the captions and credits were so powerful, it was even more ironic when they were used for blatant advertiser paybacks. The pictures of Gia by Stan Malinowski, for example, ran with a feature called “The Best Furs Yet”—which was also a vehicle for the latest of
Vogue’s
creative beauty product plugs, the fragrance “beauty note,” suggesting in the caption which advertiser’s perfumes might wear well with the clothes. The beauty note was the compromise accepted by the beauty writing staff, who felt that its predecessor, the “fragrance credit,” had violated even
Vogue’s
vague
standards of truth-in-captioning. These standards included credits for products, stores and stylist associations (a stylist
of
or
for
a certain salon or manufacturer) being creatively doled out after pictures were completed.

While the credits for garments were compromised mostly by the disproportionate number of advertiser’s clothes in the pictures, the beauty credits were open season on reality. Since many of the new beauty products couldn’t be ready in time for early magazine deadlines, it was quite common that the beauty products used were
not
those credited. As long as the shades of makeup applied were close enough to those the magazine was going to plug, nobody was ever going to know the difference.

The fragrance credit, however, had been the most preposterous. In a fragrance credit, the caption purported to identify
the perfume the model had been wearing during the session.
At least the beauty note was a little more subtle. The $20,000 chesterfield-style coat from Maximilian that Gia was modeling would be perfect with “the dash of a new French fragrance—Capucci’s Parce Que. Just what you need with sable.” And Oscar de la Renta’s perfume had “the same spirit in a scent” as the $12,500 reversible dyed mink cardigan from Grosvenor of Canada. The cardigan was available at—and these store credits were crucial, since current advertisers both counted on them and
counted
them—Bonwit Teller in New York and Chicago, Kramer’s Furs in New Haven, Roberts Neustadter in Boston, both the Alaskan Fur Company and Saks-Jandel in Kansas City, and Frost Brothers and Meyer Epstein Furs in London, Ontario.

Since models rarely got credits, their unattributed associations with
Vogue
had to be peddled in other ways. This was usually done with a standard black and white model “composite” card—with five or six photographs, the model’s vital statistics in American and European measures, and the agency’s name and address. The cards were part of the massive agency print and direct mail campaign which, besides phone calls, was the only way modeling services were really promoted. The composites were a companion to the large agency posters—called headsheets—which were regularly mailed out to art directors at magazines, ad agencies, production
companies and anywhere else that might need models.

For years, the headsheets had been conventional and rather plain looking, with postage-stamp size headshots of even the top girls and established hourly and day rates for each model: clients paid extra for lingerie or nudes. The composite cards were also generally plain and standardized. In fact, all the agencies used the same company in London for their cards.

The coming of Elite had overhauled the promotional aspect of the modeling business. One of the most visible changes had been prompted by Elite’s controversial first headsheets, which featured a shot that showed more of one model than just her head. Her breasts were exposed, which nobody had ever done before. The headsheet was also remarkable for what it didn’t show: there were no standardized rates listed for the top girls. Leaving the prices off was Casablancas’ way of letting the industry know that his top rates were negotiable—
upwards.

The bold Elite headsheet had sent a message through the industry that everyone would have to be more innovative with promotion. So when Gia’s picture appeared full-page in the October
Vogue
, the agency didn’t depend on the magazine itself to sell the new girl. Wilhelmina had hundreds of
full-color
cards made up with the Elgort photo and “Introducing Gia” printed across it in bold letters. You had to spend money to make money.

To fill her free time, Gia had signed up for a photography course at New York University. She regularly missed classes when photo sessions ran late, and eventually withdrew from the course because Tuesday and Thursday evenings at eight was turning into regular worktime. With paying jobs taking up more of her days, the testing and more experimental work with friends—a book someone was trying to put together, a freebie for some struggling magazine—got done in the early evening between dinnertime and club time. But Gia continued to take pictures, and told friends that she hoped modeling would lead her to a career on the other side of the camera. Since her days hanging out with Joe Petrellis and Maurice Tannenbaum in Philadelphia, she had
always been more interested in what a photographer did than what a model did. Lots of models took snapshots onset—especially now that Instamatic cameras were getting cheaper and easier to use—but Gia had something more ambitious in mind.

“She wanted to be a photographer but not a fashion photographer, more of a documentary photographer and that’s what she was really working at,” Sharon Beverly recalled. “She would go out and take pictures of characters on the street, the homeless. She took a lot of alkies on the street, men sitting on benches. She said she tried to talk to them. But some of them started fights with her and didn’t want her to take their pictures.”

She also began taking advantage of the city’s many repertory cinema houses. Philadelphia had one such theater, the TLA, where she and her friends had often gone to see
A Clockwork Orange
or
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, but New York had many. The photographers Gia worked with often casually mentioned important films when they were trying to explain a certain effect or affect they were looking for. To most people in the fashion world, cinema was the closest thing they had to literature.
Fashionistas
tended to be extremely well-informed about what had been and what was being
written about
—phenomena, rages, trends—but they rarely found the need to read books or articles themselves. They were easily fascinated and quickly bored: a little bit of information went a long way, and a lot of information was usually cumbersome. “Scratch the surface,” Way Bandy was known to joke about the business, “and what do you get? More surface.”

For several years, Gia had made it a habit of asking people she respected to recommend books she should read or movies she should see. She jotted the lists down in her diaries, and usually just got around to the movies. John Garfield was her favorite actor. Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo were her favorite actresses, and she sometimes made a pilgrimage to the building Garbo lived in on East Fifty-second Street to catch a glimpse of the publicly reclusive actress. Between the Bleecker Street Cinema and the Cinema Village downtown, and the Regency uptown, Gia was finally getting a chance to see some of the movies she had heard
about:
The Grand Illusion
and
Anna Karenina
, as well as more recent films like
Three Women, Persona, Seduction of Mimi
and
Swept Away.
The films filled her head with visual ideas for her own photographs. She was beginning to scribble down concepts for shots and even for short films, ideas that were no more or less baked than the ones she watched top photographers get thousands of dollars to execute.

Among the films she went to see was
Satyricon.
Since it had become fashionable to describe New York City nightlife as a series of scenes from a Fellini film, it seemed only right that she go to
watch
one.

O
ne Friday late in October, Gia’s life changed. The day had not been planned as anything unusual. She was booked with Chris von Wangenheim to do a studio sitting for
Vogue
, where she was quickly becoming the new sensation. The November issue had just come out, and it included several page-stopping pictures of her. Two were street shots by Andrea Blanche. In one, Gia was shown in a St. Laurent satin top and wool skirt, fashionably reenacting a new urban ritual: in a typical example of how fashion photographers could borrow from
anything
new in their surroundings, Gia was shot with a dalmatian leashed to her one hand and a pooperscooper in the other. In the other shot, she was posed in a black velvet Calvin Klein outfit, standing in front of a railing and a fence. To her left, waist high, was a large street sign that simply, and inexplicably, read
DEAD
.

But the truly stunning photo of Gia in the November
Vogue
was by Arthur Elgort, in a section on new form-fitting clothes. She posed in a Calvin Klein slip-dress that was falling off one shoulder: her hair was pulled back, and, in black sunglasses, she made beautiful-tough for the camera. The shot was buried far back in the section, but when
Vogue
later put together a book of its best fashion photographs, it chose the picture as the opener for the section on 1978. It was the ultimate visualization of radical chic.

The Von Wangenheim sitting was not to be anything quite
so interesting. The shots would be tossed into a hodgepodge generic fashion and accessory story called “Finds.” There were some jackets, some tops, some skirts and some belts. The fashion editor was Kesia Keeble, one of the very few to succeed in that job as a freelancer. She worked a lot for
Vogue
, and Italian
Bazaar
, as well as many advertising clients: she had recently styled the successful Calvin Klein jeans ads that Avedon had shot with Brooke Shields.

Keeble, thirty-six, was, even by the standards of the business, a talented oddball, sort of the “good witch” of the fashion industry. Tall and strong-featured, with long, dark hair streaked with one eerie line of white, she was forever obsessed with some new spiritual pursuit or New Age cureall. She had left her first husband and her full-time job at
Vogue
to set up a business with, and eventually marry, rhinestone jewelry designer Willie Woo. Later she was fashion editor at
Esquire
, and in 1976 she had married Paul Cavaco, who was a Brew Burger waiter when they met at a Buddhist meeting and had since become a successful freelance stylist.

Considering the myriad possibilities of a meeting of minds between Keeble and Von Wangenheim, the shot they had chosen was relatively simple. The girls would pose in front of and behind a chain link fence; they were to stand on a piece of green AstroTurf. Bob Fink was doing hair. The makeup artist was Sandy Linter, a beautiful blond woman in her late twenties who had recently become a successful freelancer after making her fame at the Manhattan salon of hairdresser Kenneth Battelle—the Kenneth who had become celebrated in the sixties for doing Jackie Kennedy’s hair.

It was a very long day, with a lot of different outfits being shot. When they had what they needed for
Vogue
, Keeble left, but Von Wangenheim asked Gia and some of the others if they would stay around so he could try some other shots while he had the props. He generally did not like switching immediately from a commercial assignment to doing “personal stuff.” Balancing the demands of the fashion editor, the wavering endurance of the models, and the constant fussing over the clothes was usually enough mental and physical exertion for one day. But there was still a good energy left in the studio, and Von Wangenheim had, for
some time, wanted to do some real nudes of Gia, some nudes that were uncompromised by the editorial demands of even the most liberal publications.

Von Wangenheim had Gia strip down and pose behind the fence, which was being held up on either side by his assistants. Sandy Linter stayed around to help with the hair and makeup. One of these shots was to be paired with a picture Von Wangenheim had taken of his infant daughter Christine. In that shot, the child and another woman were photographed from the waist down: the baby was naked, her genitalia exposed, her face obscured by the long black skirt of the other woman, who was also wearing lace-up high-heeled boots. Von Wangenheim would later explain the shot of his child as an attempt to prove that having “babies and a stable family life doesn’t exclude ‘le bonheur’ and eroticism. As it turned out, it deepened certain experiences. At one point I said to myself, ‘If that’s how I feel, if Christine is whom I love, I should be able to photograph her in the context of my photographic personality.’”