Until she married in 1956, glamorous things had been Kathleen’s livelihood as well. In high school, she studied retailing and joined the teen modeling club at the local Strawbridge and Clothier department store: she had been on TV a few times modeling for the Board of Education. After graduation, she worked at the most exclusive women’s shop in the Northeast, Saks Frankford, with a name borrowed from the famous New York retailer and a location under the Frankford El. With her lightened hair elaborately coiffed and her face boldly made up behind her oversize spectacles, Kathleen sold clothing to those women who could afford higher fashion items and didn’t have to buy knockoffs or sew from a pattern book. She also helped to prepare fashion shows. She loved everything about the women’s retail business, but found working with the models especially fascinating.
But after she was married—to a man her parents initially objected to because he looked old enough to be her father and was not only divorced, but had a child from his first marriage who visited on occasion—Kathleen was content to be a mother and a wife. It was “an important job,” she said, “what you were created for … if you failed at that, you failed at being a woman.” She had three babies in three years, two sons and then a daughter, Gia, whose unusual name Joe Carangi said he remembered hearing while stationed in Italy during the war.
While Kathleen had struggled with her babies and Joe with his business, they had been able to maintain the outward
appearance of happiness and growing prosperity. There was no time to even register dissatisfaction among the numerous distractions and family responsibilities. Kathleen’s parents and several of her sisters, as well as Joe’s mother and one of his two brothers, lived nearby. At different times, almost every uncle, aunt, nephew, niece and cousin had worked for Joe, who was always a soft touch for a job or a loan he knew would never be paid back. His kindness was most often extended to his twin brother Dan, who had periodic problems with gambling debts.
As the kids grew older and the Carangis moved up in the world, Kathleen became, with each new fur and Cadillac, increasingly dissatisfied with her life while Joe became increasingly impatient with her complaints. They brought out the worst in each other. He was a man who wanted life to be simpler than it was and she was a woman who wanted life to be more complicated than it needed to be. He also liked to tease, especially “the girls,” and she was incapable of rolling with what she saw as malicious punches. While he had always managed to ignore her shrill lecturing and dramatic exits before—even joking with the kids, “Oh, look, we got mommy mad”—she began getting his attention. And when his very long fuse burned down, his frustration could turn to violence. He threw things, he broke things. It was his house, he said, and he could destroy it if he wanted—while Kathleen figured out how many fifty-cent hoagies and forty-five-cent steak sandwiches he would have to sell to redecorate the wall he had just smashed.
Sometimes he hit his wife and she hit back. Sometimes he would storm out of the house for an hour or two. Sometimes she would run out, with Gia in tow, and ride the El train until she calmed down; on occasion she even left, with or without the kids, for a day or two. While the children were never hit, they were often caught in the crossfire. An argument might typically begin with Kathleen telling the kids to set the table, and Joe ordering them not to because that was “Mommy’s job.”
“He didn’t think the kids should have to do anything,” Kathleen recalled. “He thought they should be allowed to enjoy themselves. He’d take the kids to work and pay them before they started working.”
While there were a great many problems between the Carangis—it had always been a marriage made in purgatory—Kathleen came to see her husband’s jealousy and his violence as the main issues. He once, she recalled, “smacked me in the face during sex and accused me of thinking of someone else.” But after a while, it wasn’t entirely clear that he didn’t have some reason to be jealous. “He accused me, but he didn’t know for a fact,” Kathleen recalled. “He tried to prove it, but he couldn’t prove it. He had been insanely jealous, always. I couldn’t smile at a customer—if I did he said I was making out. A customer comes in and I’m not supposed to smile?”
“Joe didn’t know about it for a long time,” recalled Dan Carangi, Joe’s brother, “but I saw her with other men. She just wasn’t happy in marriage, she wanted men falling all over her. I just wanted to see my brother happy, so I never said anything. One time I was back in the kitchen of the restaurant and Kathleen said ‘You know, I could
make
you if I wanted.’ This was the way she thought, that every man in the world was in love with her.”
Kathleen’s youngest sister believed the problem was more subtle than Kathleen wanting other men. “I think she wanted Joe to give her all kinds of attention and think that she was like a sex goddess and make that fantasy come true,” she said, “but she wasn’t willing to respond to him and make that happen.”
Joe and Kathleen’s sons would later try to make sense of the problems their own ways. “My dad wasn’t around a lot,” said Michael Carangi, Gia’s middle brother, “and Kathleen couldn’t deal with that. She wanted to go out. You know, women like to go out and enjoy the money.”
“Most of the fights were after we went to bed,” recalled Joe Carangi, Jr.—known as “Joey” to the family. “Kathleen would always have some crying story about it afterwards, y’know. ‘Oh, oh, what am I going to do,’ and this kind of stuff, crying. In the meantime, we were pretty much taking care of ourselves. I mean, Kathleen never prepared us meals or anything. We ate whatever was around in the place. Once in a while she cooked something, not too often. The way I remember it, she was mostly either in bed or out of the house.”
Kathleen saw it all in far simpler terms. Her husband was a sexist, violent man who had learned too well from his own father—who was referred to as “The Mister” by Joe’s mother. To Kathleen, Joe was a good provider—he certainly supported his family materially—but an intolerable companion. And she was still young. She felt more attractive than ever. She had lost all the weight that came with her three pregnancies and then some. There had to be more to life as a woman than this.
Joe Carangi became more aggressive and jealous, Kathleen more combative and troubled. She was never an early riser, but she stopped getting up in the morning altogether. She had a doctor check her into a hospital psychiatric ward and later made a suicide attempt. “I tried to kill myself because Joe tried to examine me to see if I had sex with someone else,” Kathleen recalled. “He sat and watched me take all the pills. He thought I was being dramatic. Then when I started falling asleep, he finally called the police and took me to the hospital.
“All the years that he abused me, I had gone to the cops, but I knew it was a man’s world. I would call the cops and he would be in a rage, and when they’d come he would be as nice as pie.”
The situation finally reached the point that Kathleen believed if she didn’t leave “he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him…. There have been times when I thought, for the sake of the children, maybe I should’ve tried to work it out more. But leaving them with him was the only way I could get out. He
never
would have let me take them. And I really never thought it would hurt them as badly as it did.
“I didn’t realize the full impact of what I did until much later. I came to understand that kids only want one thing. As long as Mommy and Daddy wake up in the house with them, whatever they’re conditioned to is just normal. If you cry all the time, your kids get used to it. They think everybody’s mommy cries, everybody’s father punches holes in the wall.”
And so on that night in February of 1971, a new decade began for Gia Marie Carangi. The next day her father would be devastated, his rage yielding to heartbreak as he began to realize that his second marriage was over; Gia and her
brothers would be slightly relieved because, with one parent gone, at least the yelling would stop.
The aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins descended on 4027 Fitler Street to help Joe Carangi take care of his kids and his home, an enterprise for which he was ill-prepared, except he knew how to cook. But even with all of this activity—and the knowledge that somewhere, at the other end of a telephone line, their mother was out there—it was impossible to blot out the feeling that someone had died.
When the decade was well upon them, social commentators would declare the seventies “the me decade” and attempt to dissect the phenomenon of a decaying social order that transformed self-revelation into self-deification and the search for personal freedom into the demand for personal license. For Gia Marie Carangi, the seventies would be the “me decade” for a far less esoteric reason: because there was no more “us.”
Until the divorce, Gia had always been, in every way, her mother’s child. She was supposed to be the little girl to whom Kathleen could pass on the mantle, or yoke, of womanhood. But Gia never seemed to be interested in joining the “girls’ side” of the Carangi family. “Joe would spoil her,” Kathleen recalled. “We would go to Atlantic City every weekend in the summer and she would just put her arms up—she wanted to be in the rolling chair [on the Boardwalk] or be carried—and he would give in to her. Well, she was absolutely beautiful, you couldn’t refuse her.
“But, in other ways, the boys could do anything they wanted and Gia had to toe the line.”
Gia would remember what her father denied her more than what he gave. “My Dad was always working,” she would later write of her childhood, “and when he was around he paid more attention to my brothers. I would try to get his attention and he would reject me by putting me down, making fun of me, teasing me. He would do this in front of my brothers. I felt like they were better than me and the only difference was they were boys. I feel my father never gave me what I needed growing up which was love, understanding, time … he never gave me the time of day. When I was little my parents had this big closet. I used to
go in there to play dress-up. Instead of choosing my Mom’s clothes to look at I would look at my Dad’s. I would go into my brother Joey’s closet and try his clothes on. I think I thought if I was a boy my father would love me.”
Gia was a bright, quiet child with thick, long brown hair and bangs. Her hair was the focus of much motherly fussing: Kathleen liked to braid it and tie it with ribbons, which Gia always immediately yanked out. The hair was never cut, except to trim the bangs, until she was eight years old; her mother had the shorn locks washed, rebraided and put into a box that the young girl sometimes took to school for show and tell. Gia loved stuffed toys—her favorite was Smokey the Bear—and she slept in a frilly white four-poster bed full of them. She also loved animals. The family had a white cat named Creampuff and they went through a series of dogs, all of which managed to get run over. After a school bus killed their black poodle, Sam, all the neighborhood kids would chant “dog killer, dog killer” whenever the poor driver pulled up to the bus stop. Unlike some small children, Gia had no fear of animals. Just down the block from their house was a family with a huge black dog that terrorized neighborhood children. Gia would astonish her mother by walking right up to the dog and bonking it on the head, which immediately stopped the barking.
Gia’s early childhood mannerisms were considered so adorable that she was encouraged to speak in baby talk long after it was appropriate. She also wet the bed long past infancy, a problem that, like much of what went on in the Carangi household, was exaggerated rather than constructively addressed. “That was always a big thing,” recalled Nancy Adams, Kathleen’s sister. “You knew that it was always disrupting and my sister just bitched about everything and Gia’s brothers used to make fun of her for [the bed wetting]. So even though all the kids were together—my oldest sister had eight children of her own, so there were a lot of us—Gia kind of kept to herself. You know shy people … as they get older, you’re not as conscious that they’re shy. They’re
quiet
, they’re
intellectual
, they’re
withdrawn.
I think they thought she was either shy or miserable. They weren’t sure which. But she was always pretty bratty.”
Much to Kathleen’s irritation, Gia was as strong-minded
as she was, and insisted on learning everything her own way. “Always the hardest way possible,” recalled Kathleen. “We went through a period when she was two that she couldn’t have birthday candles because she was playing with matches. And she would eat things. I found them on the way out. I couldn’t believe it. She ate a big chunk of snake plant. She swallowed a great big wooden button.” When shopping with her mother, Gia would sometimes disappear, purposely getting lost so she could fiddle with the
EMERGENCY STOP
button on the escalator or hear her name announced over the department store public address system. That unusual name also became an obsession when Gia learned penmanship. She would practice writing her name on nearly any blank piece of paper or open space. While looking under her daughter’s bed for something, Kathleen discovered “Gia Marie Carangi” written all over the slats.
Gia rejected out of hand much of what her mother tried to explain to her about the way a young girl should think. “She had a boyfriend in grade school,” Kathleen recalled, “and she was describing him as a little smaller than she was. And I said to her, ‘Why don’t you want a
bigger
guy, girls are supposed to have a big guy to protect them.’ She said, ‘I’ll protect
him. ‘
That was another side of her: she thought she could always protect you.”
They often disagreed and were clearly locked in a battle for attention, but Gia and Kathleen were nonetheless extremely close, in a way that mothers and daughters often are almost despite their actions or intentions. As a small child Gia had often wandered across the hall in the middle of the night to come sleep next to her mother. And there were times when the young girl wanted to do nothing more than be in the house with Kathleen. Her mommy was, she often said, her best friend.