Thing of Beauty (34 page)

None of this was good news at the Wilhelmina agency. They had spent the better part of the previous year trying to make sure that Hansen, their workhorse, was happy. They had even sent her favorite booker, Kay Mitchell, out to open a Wilhelmina office in LA. Patti had begun making the inevitable model noises about branching out into acting, which meant her full-time modeling days were probably numbered. Wilhelmina had already lost Pam Dawber to theatrical agents, and wasn’t about to let the same thing happen again.

The news about Hansen and Richards also came at a personally inopportune moment for Wilhelmina Cooper, who was still basking in what was perhaps the most powerful public recognition of her career. She had appeared on the
cover of the December 3, 1979, edition of
Fortune
magazine: not as a model, but as the head of a successful business. She was one of the first women to ever grace the cover of a business magazine by herself, instead of on some successful man’s arm. She considered the cover an incredible honor. It was also likely to be a boost for business. The cover shot illustrated the first major magazine business story ever done on the modeling industry. The shot also represented one of the first times that anyone had written about modeling without referring first to Eileen Ford, or to a current Ford model.

The article portrayed Ford and Wilhelmina as basically neck and neck: Ford with $11.8 million in billings, Willie with just under $11 million, and John Casablancas’s Elite tallying just under $5 million to pull ahead of the heavily male Zoli agency. But Elite was clearly coming up fast. Nine of the past twelve
Vogue
covers had been Elite models, and Casablancas reportedly had the highest average earnings per model.

Casablancas also used the article as a way to announce the direction his business would be taking. He no longer saw the need for regional agencies in America or Europe. He had opened a modeling school in San Francisco and an office in Los Angeles for print work. He had also purchased minority shares in a rival agency in Paris and in London’s Models One. “I aim to be autonomous,” he explained, “I no longer want to deal with two-faced agents who promise me a model they also promise to six of my competitors.” To make good on that threat, he would eventually have to buy out—or stab in the back—almost every friend he had in the business.

In late December, 1979, Gia got her own magazine story. She was on the cover of the new
Cosmopolitan
, but she was also on the cover of
Philadelphia
magazine’s annual “Hot People to Watch” issue. “Meet Gia,” the headline said, below the Denis Piel outtake from the
Vogue
collections shot, “South Philly soda jerk to New York’s hottest model.” Executive Editor Maury Z. Levy had gone to New York to spend an afternoon with Gia: she invited Levy and a photographer into her apartment, popped open a can of Colt 45, and
said whatever came into her head. She didn’t even bother to turn down her stereo, which was playing the B-side of Blondie’s new
Eat to the Beat
record. Levy probably could not have made up a better opening scene—although he might have tried—than Gia listening to Debbie Harry sing “Die Young Stay Pretty”: “Deteriorate in your own time, leave only the best behind, you gotta live fast cause it won’t last”

“The bad thing about New York,” Gia told Levy, “is that they don’t have steak sandwiches here. You know, I really miss Pat’s [South Philly’s legendary steak shop]. It’s funny, people think I worry about my weight. Well, I don’t. Sometimes I even like to get pudgy. I think it’s cute. I don’t like to be real thin. Sometimes I see these other models, they take their clothes off and I think, ‘God, give this girl some beef.’ They’re usually real bony, like chickens. They’re always ordering health food. I hate it. I order a hamburger. I mean, I get off on food, you know. I’d rather do food than any drug.” When asked about the appeal of her
Cosmo
covers, she joked, “It’s all in the lungs,” and proceeded to take a deep breath that dramatically expanded her tight stretch top, “and I have very big lungs.”

Wilhelmina Cooper told the magazine that she expected Gia would earn close to $500,000 in 1980. “She can be really sophisticated in one shooting, and be a real Lolita type in another,” Willie said, “and this will give her a long life span.” Gia said that sometimes she just sat back and laughed when she thought about all the money she was making. She claimed to have an accountant—a reference to her stepfather, who was trying to get her to pay attention to her bookkeeping—and said he was “dying to get me into real estate, like, I’m gonna buy a townhouse and stuff. You know, you have to invest because no matter how much money I make, the government’s gonna take half of it away from me. And, like, that ain’t fair. The government takes all this money away from me, and what are they doing for me? I consider myself a pretty good citizen and all. I’m nineteen years old and I’m makin’ myself a hell of a lot of money and what am I getting for it? They’re just taking it away. I don’t even know where it’s going. It’s a real drag. I’m really pissed off at the government.”

While looking around Gia’s apartment, Levy noted that
she had two nude Polaroids of herself hung on the wall and several others wedged into the bathroom mirror. When he asked her about them, she just shrugged her shoulders like it was no big deal. She explained that she was not worried about the short professional life span of most models. “I’m gonna get out before that happens,” she said, “because I feel satisfied already from modeling. I did it, you know what I mean? I made it” She also said she had a twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend. Levy had been told by people who knew her in Philadelphia that she was gay, but he ran her quotes about the boyfriend anyway. She answered most of his questions in monosyllables, so he took whatever he could get What did this boyfriend do for a living? “Nothing,” she laughed, “he’s a bum. Most models I know, they really have these rich boyfriends, but I’m not into a guy’s money. I’m not impressed by somebody who’s got a Lear Jet and who’s going to take me to Florida every weekend … and all Studio 54 is is a bunch of guys in three-piece suits who want to give you cocaine.

“I just want a body, like a nice hot body and some big lips. Forget everything else.”

The
Philadelphia
story ended the same way as the interview did—with Gia sitting on her couch listening to one of the few Blondie songs written by her pool-playing buddy Jimmy Destri. “Every day you’ve got to wake up,” Debbie Harry sang, “and disappear behind your makeup … hey I’m living in a magazine, page to page in my teenage dream, Cause I’m not living in the real world, No I’m not living in the real world, no more.”

When the article came out, just as she was getting home for Christmas, Gia was stunned. “She did not want to do that article,” recalled Kathleen Sperr. “She got very upset about the whole thing. She didn’t like the people that came to visit her, so she put them on, told them a lot of stuff just to answer them. She didn’t want to tell them anything that was the truth. Then when the article came out, she couldn’t believe it. She felt they had ripped her apartment apart unmercifully. She was totally upset. She talked to her different friends, to Harry King and Way Bandy, and they told her not to worry about it. They said, ‘If they spelled your name
right, don’t worry about it’ But, she was mad. She was fit to be tied.”

The article was not very flattering. Nor were the letters to the editor it spawned. “Your interview with Gia,” one reader wrote, “if it didn’t show us anything else, reinforced the statement, ‘beauty is only skin deep.’”

“If I was a parent,” wrote another, “after reading your story on Gia Carangi, modeling would be the last thing that I would allow my daughter to become involved in.”

“Admittedly, I am more accustomed to writing this kind of letter to
other
magazines that begin with the letter ‘P,’” panted a third reader. “Gia is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Can you show us more? (or less would be even better).”

Flattering or not, the article did serve to link Gia’s name with her face, at least in her home town. In all the gay and straight clubs in Philadelphia, where stories had been circulating about a local girl who was now this big-time model, the legend had become real.

And the article served another purpose. Gia had told Levy that the main reason she agreed to the interview was because “my mom will think it’s neat.” And now, nobody could doubt that Kathleen Sperr’s daughter really was the one on all those
Cosmo
covers. The ones she had framed and hung over the couch in the family room. The ones that made Gia wonder if her mother hadn’t gone a little overboard in living vicariously through the model fantasy.

Gia was no longer playing along with her mother quite as readily as she had for the first year or so. “At the beginning she told me everything,” Kathleen recalled. “Later, she wouldn’t answer questions. She would say, ‘You don’t ask Michael or Joey how many hoagies they made. Why ask me? It’s
a job!’
We would ask when pictures were coming out, and she got all like that about it. She would tell you stories, but you wouldn’t know they were about a particular picture. I was interested in everything she did, and she knew that. But if you got too wrapped up in the magazines or particular pictures, then she felt that was taking something away from her. It was like, you were interested in the magazines and her work and not in her.

“She couldn’t understand how great everybody felt about
somebody in their family being a big model. She simply could not deal with it. She got paranoid about people staring at her. If she was home and we had people here, she would stay in her room. You could be walking down the street with her and suddenly she would jump into a cab because she was convinced everyone was looking at her. She would get hyper if we were walking down the street and a limo went by and I was looking at it She said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like if you’re in a limo and they’re gawking at you.’ She’d see famous people on the street and she’d tell you who they were, but then duck down. She didn’t want me popping my eyeballs because of who they were. But at the same time she was thrilled to point them out to you.

“What happened to me and Henry one time—and if Gia were with us, she would have killed me—we were in Bloomingdales’ fine giftware department and they had a whole series of picture frames on display and they had cut pictures of girls out of magazines, like they do. And I saw Gia’s picture. I got all excited. And Henry was starting to get embarrassed, he was telling me to calm down. I was walking back around to see if people were looking at it. I guess I did overreact. But it was my daughter!”

In early January, Gia took a ten-day trip to a spa in Pompano Beach, Florida, for German
Vogue.
John Stember was the photographer. Frances Stein, who still did some freelance fashion editing, was in charge of the trip. Kim Alexis was the other model.

“Gia was with us, because Frances
loved
Gia—the way Gia
looked
, that is,” Stember recalled. “So Frances immediately took one look at Kim Alexis and said, This girl looks completely stupid and I don’t want to use her. She doesn’t look like she’s got a brain in her body.’ Frances’ whole thing was, if the girl didn’t look intelligent she wasn’t and, there-fore, she didn’t want any part of it ‘cause she thought that was an insult to women.

“Frances Stein is a wonderful woman, completely mad, and great taste, best taste of anyone I’ve ever met probably. But she has a low boiling point and she will not take any shit from anybody. She just goes crazy. So we had Gia, and Frances had arrived with about twenty coffins full of clothes
and jewelry—she had a number of slaves carrying this stuff. And she would come with pages and pages of Xeroxes of images, she did tremendous preparation so you knew where you were going.

“So, this thing immediately became, like, here’s Frances and here’s Gia. Gia won’t take any crap and Frances won’t take any crap.”

Gia’s wake-up call for hair and makeup was six
A.M
. She missed it, but they were finally able to get her ready by ten-thirty or so. The first shots were to be at poolside on a chaise lounge, and Stember was making the final preparations—moving the camera tripod back and forth, checking the light meter readings and the focus, doing Polaroids of the scene. When everything was ready, Gia was brought from the shaded area where she had been made up and was carefully arranged on the chaise.

“I looked through the camera,” Stember recalled, “and I was just about focused on her face, when I saw her move off to the side of the frame. The next thing I heard was a splash. She was in the pool. And she just laughed. This is the kind of thing she did. So, of course, Frances got into an outrage and this is how the whole thing went.

“The funniest thing of all was that, at the end of the trip, Frances was so pissed off with Gia that she decided that we were leaving without her. Gia had no money, and no ticket, and we were in Florida. I had everybody in the rental van. At Frances’ insistence, nobody told Gia. So we’re driving away and I see Gia running out of the front door of the hotel. I’m driving the thing, right, and I’ve got Gia with her case in hand running behind the van—white, she’s ashen white in the face—and I can see all this in the rearview mirror. Frances is saying,
‘Drive, drive, drive,’
and I’m saying, ‘Frances, I just can’t drive and leave her there.’ And she’s putting her foot on
my foot
on the accelerator.
‘Drive, drive, drive
, leave that fucking bitch,
drive!’

“And I said, ‘No, no, no, I can’t
do
this.’ So I brake, and the next thing, the door is wrenched open. And Gia knows it’s not me, it’s Frances. So the two of them are rolling out of the van, punching each other. They literally got into a fistfight. But this was Gia.”

Back in New York, a fight of another sort was just ending. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the co-owners of Studio 54, were about to be sentenced in Federal District Court after pleading guilty to evading almost $500,000 in corporate income taxes.