Thing of Beauty (32 page)

“Gia just wasn’t gonna kiss anybody’s ass, and there was
so much
ass-kissing going on,” Murray recalled. “The first really famous story I heard about her—and this was when I was still at the magazine—well, Gia at one point refused to do lingerie shots for
Vogue.
She had an extraordinary body, but I don’t think she was comfortable being booked for lingerie, hanging around in a bra and panties all day. And she was in her rights to refuse that kind of work. It’s one thing if you want to do it for advertising—fine, then she would do it for the money. But for $150 a day for
Vogue?
I can understand turning that down.

“Anyway, they had a sitting organized at Westbury Gardens out on Long Island. They had a location van, and everybody was supposed to meet at Condé Nast and go out together. At the last minute the booker called and said Gia had her own car and she wanted to drive out herself. She
swore
she would be there on time. And she was. She drives up, on time, gets out of her car, walks up and sees that there’s all this underwear hanging in the van.
Vogue
had not told her that they wanted to do lingerie: they got her out there under false pretenses.

“So, she just calmly says to the editor, ‘I forgot something
in my car,’ and she drives back to New York, leaving them all there. I thought that was spectacular.”

Murray had come to her attitude toward model behavior through a series of eye-opening experiences in the business. “When I started and these models were my age,” she recalled, “I felt, at times, that I would have traded places with
any
of them. Not long after I started, this model Paola killed herself, just a couple months after she was on the cover of
Vogue.
I thought, ‘How could a girl who got the cover of
Vogue
kill herself?’ It was inconceivable.

“Then there was a girl I had known since I was a teenager who became a top model—her name was Lisa Taylor. We weren’t, like, close friends, but I had done some growing up with her and I thought she had the most perfect life in the world. We were supposed to have dinner one night, and I couldn’t find her. I called her booker, and she said Lisa was in the hospital because she tried to kill herself. Then I started to
get
it, I started to understand. I was stupid. I thought that it would be a hell of a job to be traveling and young and beautiful and hanging out with all these glamorous people and having men beat your door down. What more could a girl want? Lisa was not alone. There were
many
who needed a hell of a lot more than to be told how beautiful they were. A lot of them didn’t feel that beautiful. They didn’t understand, they didn’t get it; they couldn’t make the distinction. The
only thing it was about
was what they looked like. It was only how they looked.”

The bottom line was the picture. And as Polly Mellen’s assistant, Murray got a taste of what would be tolerated in the name of beauty. “If it meant an assistant had to run fifteen blocks to get a pomegranate, it was done,” she recalled. “One day I had to organize a dinner party for Janice Dickinson. Janice arrived at the studio and had had a fight with Mike and she was upset and so Mrs. Mellen—instead of having me iron or do the things I normally had to do-gave me the job of finding out everything Janice needed for her party and ordering it. Janice was crying, and it was a picture for Ralph Lauren. Mr. Penn was the photographer, and he was going in close and he couldn’t photograph Janice’s eyes if she was crying.

“So I was calling stores and if they didn’t have the cheese
she wanted I had to go into the dressing room and ask, ‘Janice, they don’t have Asiago, would this be okay?’ And I’m just thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ In fairness to Mrs. Mellen, what was she going to do? The only way to get control of the situation was to not let Janice talk to Mike for the rest of the day—when he called he was
not
put through—and have me do all the work.

“So, you can understand why I so relished the Gia stories. It might make me look like an idiot now, but I honestly felt at the time that there was something terribly
right
about her rebellion. To me, she was just a sweet girl who had this streak in her, and I greatly admired her rebellion.”

Gia, her look, and her attitude had moved to a new place on Fourth Avenue, in a low-rise apartment building near Union Square, on the uptown fringe of downtown. The one-bedroom apartment had plain white walls, hardwood floors and a pass-through from a small kitchen: it was $600 a month plus another $85 a month for garage space for her car. Gia furnished the apartment sparsely, as was the fashion among fashion people, since they weren’t home much. The living room was decorated with an upholstered, tiger-striped corner section from a jungle-theme conversation pit (on which sat a pillow in the shape of the Frosted Flakes mascot, Tony the Tiger), a lamp in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, a massive gilt-framed mirror waiting to be hung, a stool covered with Fiorucci stickers, a TV and a framed photograph of Debbie Harry. On the black, smoked-glass coffee table was a small, white plastic spaceship toy with a green alien sticking out. Along the wall that led to the tiny bedroom was a plastic strip full of pictures of Batman and Superman and some Polaroids from recent sittings tacked together.

Gia could rarely be found in her apartment. Her mother often kept up with her professional whereabouts through the credits on her published editorial photos and through her postcards. Her private life could be pieced together by the growing stack of New York City parking summonses—many from tickets written near Sandy Linter’s building—that were being delivered to Richboro, where Gia’s car was registered.

The agency kept track of her by having her call in. It was
easier than trying to hunt her down. In most cases, a big girl like Gia would have been long-attached to a particular booker who would know her haunts, her habits and even when her menstrual period was due so big bookings weren’t made on bloaty, uncomfortable days. But Gia had never become particularly close with any of her bookers. Her main relationship at the agency was with Wilhelmina herself.

Willie was guiding Gia through her career—which was exploding. In America, she had just premiered in her first cosmetics campaign, for Maybelline’s new Super Shiny Automatic Lip Color. Maybelline wasn’t as high fashion as Revlon or Estée Lauder, the two companies that dominated the high end of retail cosmetics. So the print ads, shot at Regine’s, appeared in
Glamour
rather than
Vogue.
And Gia’s picture—in which she was applying “Melonshine” with the Super Shiny trademark wand—was plastered over counter cards and other point-of-purchase materials in drugstores rather than department stores.

In Europe, even though Gia’s editorial work for Italian
Bazaar
and the various
Vogues
was limited, her public recognition was high—the Dior Boutiques ads were everywhere—and about to get higher. She had been chosen as the sole model for a large portfolio of Giorgio Armani ads, shot by Florentine art photographer Aldo Fallai, that would appear all over Europe. She had no contract—Italian manufacturers rarely paid top market prices for models—but she would certainly appear, to the international fashion world, to be the “Giorgio Armani girl.” In the photos, her hair was pulled back to appear short. In fact, it was just growing back after a haircut that had been done for a
Vogue
pictorial with Irving Penn, who had documented the process and the finished product. Gia hated the haircut so much that she canceled all her bookings for two weeks. She only emerged from her apartment for a
Vogue
sitting with Richard Avedon.

Avedon was the last of the major New York fashion photographers to come around to booking Gia. “She was not an Avedon girl,” said Francesco Scavullo, “Avedon wouldn’t have found her that divine.” It was amazing that Avedon, at the age of fifty-six, found
anything
in fashion
photography divine anymore. He had been the most influential eye in the industry for nearly thirty years, had been discovered and rediscovered by every client in fashion, had inspired the Hollywood musical
Funny Face
and had basically done it all, nine or ten times.

Avedon had surfaced when the fashion industry resurfaced after World War II. A star-struck autograph hound and high school dropout from the Bronx, whose father had owned a Fifth Avenue clothing store until the Depression, Avedon had spent the war as a Merchant Marine taking identification pictures. After the war, he enrolled in a New School for Social Research design course being taught by
Harper’s Bazaar
art director Alexey Brodovitch, and then began hounding Brodovitch to give him work. He eventually did—when Avedon stopped trying to take grand, elegant photographs, and began shooting more casual pictures of his own girlfriend and her friends. Those pictures launched his career, and he soon began shooting fashion and portraits for
Bazaar
as well as advertising work. From that point on, he was
Avedon
, and he had been skimming the cream off the top of commercial photography ever since: taking the fashion photographs, celebrity portraits, movie stills and advertising shots that defined several eras.

Since coming to Condé Nast in the mid-sixties just after Diana Vreeland, Avedon had been given an extraordinarily large percentage of the company’s editorial work—there were periods during which he shot close to ninety percent of all Condé Nast covers. But Vreeland’s departure coincided with Avedon’s new choice of aperture: he began working with an old-fashioned Deardorff camera, which shot 8 × 10-inch negatives, because, he said, his standard Rolleiflex “was beginning to take the picture … I wanted nothing to help the photograph except what I could draw out of the sitter.” The new camera—and a new insistence on shooting with seamless backgrounds—gave Avedon a new signature look and photographs of uncharacteristic clarity and richness of detail.

But the Deardorff also hampered Avedon’s usefulness to
Vogue.
Its very slow shutter locked Avedon into very controlled studio settings—even his outdoor art pictures were being shot on seamless—just as
Vogue
wanted its power photographer shooting fast on the street. Avedon was dooming
himself to pre-modernism. No matter how much that disappointed the Polly Mellens, it all seemed part of the plan. He wouldn’t be asked to travel as much, and his sittings would become even more exclusive, his talents valued even higher. Now clients would hire him when they wanted the best of the best, when money was no object. Whenever the ante was raised on fees, or creative control, Avedon would be there to rake in the pot.

His latest such triumph was a high-profile ad campaign for Italian designer Gianni Versace. Now that Versace was designing his own line and looking to make a huge splash in America and Europe—in men’s clothes, for which he was better known, as well as women’s—he wanted to follow in the well-publicized footsteps of Calvin Klein, who had realized that the public’s fascination with the fashion business and with modeling could be used to make the
campaign itself
an event. Klein hired the most visible models in the world—first Patti Hansen and then, when Patti wanted $60,000 to reprise her Times Square billboard, Brooke Shields—and had them shot by the photographers with the highest name recognition. Then he hired well-connected fashion publicists and let celebrity turn advertising into news.

Knowing all this, Versace decided to out-Klein Calvin. He and Avedon decided that the spring 1980 Versace campaign would employ not one but
all
of the top high-fashion girls in New York, in groups and singles. The top male models of the day would be hired strictly as “props” for the shots. And instead of letting an art director or stylist control the sittings, Avedon would do it himself, assisted by the models and the crew sent over with Versace’s instructions: Gianni’s sister, Donatella, and his protégé, Paul Beck, a young American who had joined the Versace organization after modeling in the company’s first-ever men’s campaign. It would be an unusual group effort to make unusual group pictures, the need for a camaraderie exacerbated by Avedon’s slow 8 × 10 camera, which required longer-than-average poses and took ten minutes just to produce a Polaroid. The models would get to decide which of the clothes they wanted to wear and be asked to move and improvise. Then they would hold the improvised poses for excruciatingly long periods.

The campaign was so prestigious that even though the rates were hardly extravagant (for Gia, $1,250 a day) and included no residuals or extras, they could not be refused. Balking at the day rate meant losing one’s spot in the campaign that, by design, defined who the top high-fashion girls were. They were Patti Hansen, Gia, Janice Dickinson, Renee Russo, Beverly Johnson, Kelly LeBrock and Jerry Hall. The pictures were done on simple colored backgrounds, lit and shot so they had an other-worldly richness. And the posing had an unusual flow to it: the models were hanging on each other, leaning on each other, somehow moving without moving. Instead of one or two signature shots to drive home the image of the campaign, there were dozens, to appear in magazines, catalogs and point-of-purchase material all over Europe and America.

Gia was the central figure in many of the shots, perhaps because she interacted more with the male models. Renee Russo sat on one model like he was a chair and Patti Hansen stood a little stiffly even among the unclothed men. But Gia’s shots looked like she and the guys were actually grabbing at each other, toying with each other. In several shots, she pulled the male models’ hair as they held her: in one, her hand was curled inside the waistband of the man’s pants. Gia was also the model called upon to wear most of the bathing suits and revealing tops: having “the best tits in the business” was working to her advantage.

The Versace campaign was an international sensation and it sold a lot of clothes. But Avedon’s most modern pictures in years were memorable for other reasons as well. They succeeded in capturing a rare moment. They were snapshots of the beauty-industrial complex and New York City at their peak of craziness and creativity and camaraderie and promise—when everyone seemed happy and healthy and wealthy enough, and it looked as if the hip, not the meek, would inherit the earth.