Gia was busy generating her own horror stories in semiretirement. Just after midnight on Sunday, March 22, a suburban Philadelphia police officer in a marked Jeep was staking out an apartment complex when he saw a little red sports car come barreling down a divided, tree-lined street. The car collided with the dead-end fence, backed up, jumped the traffic island, and zoomed off. The officer turned on his siren and began a high-speed chase through the residential neighborhood and into another township, calling officers in both jurisdictions for backup. When the careening car finally stalled, the officer got out of his Jeep and got close enough to see the female driver before she started her engine again and drove away.
The officer jumped back into his Jeep and finally pulled even with the sports car, trying to force it off the road. The driver instead turned toward him and played bumper cars until he backed off. By that time, other officers had come from the opposite direction and blocked off the next intersection. Gia was taken into custody.
She had a strong scent of alcohol on her breath and fresh track marks on her arms. A doctor’s exam showed her blood alcohol to be within an acceptable range: she was under the influence of cocaine. “She was upset, pretty mouthy and obnoxious,” recalled the arresting officer. “She did say that she was a model, and at one point she was saying how much she made as a model and that we were only cops and peons, whatever. She was a rather attractive girl, just screwed up on whatever she was screwed up on.”
The arrest was just the beginning of a nightmarish summer at “The Hacienda”—the name Gia’s friends had given to the Spanish-style Sperr residence. In early June, Kathleen and Henry went to Bloomington, Indiana, to get their 1978 gold Corvette certified. “I was real into Corvettes that year,” Kathleen recalled. When they got home, they found every surface in the house covered with a thin layer of soot. “Gia almost burned the house down,” Kathleen said. “She put something in the fireplace and didn’t open the flue, and then she fell asleep because she was so high on heroin. I screamed about that for three days.”
Gia had also developed a frightening abscess on the top
of her hand—the very sight of which made her mother ill. “At that time, her hand started getting really infected, because she was shooting into it,” Kathleen said. “How she ever kept that arm, I don’t know. The infection was absolutely horrible. I said, ‘Gia, if you die, people will say to me
where were you?’ “
Gia spent the summer trying to kick drugs and periodically taking jobs. She was based in Bucks County and occasionally went down to Atlantic City. Her brothers and father now lived permanently at the Shore, only ninety miles away—less than an hour the way Gia drove—but far enough that they weren’t much a part of her day-to-day life. In fact, as they opened two Hoagie City locations—one around the corner from Resorts and a second a block from Caesars—they were only vaguely aware of how bad her drug problems had become, and Gia did her best to keep it that way. Only Michael even had an inkling, but he had a life (and some drug problems) of his own.
Gia’s aunt Nancy couldn’t really help. She still lived in Philadelphia, but she found herself unable to deal with Gia’s drug problems. It was too painful and hopeless a situation for her to be around, so she increasingly distanced herself from her troubled niece.
Gia was represented, however momentarily, by a new agency called Legends, which Kay Mitchell had opened after finally parting ways with what was left of Wilhelmina. One of the jobs Legends arranged for Gia fell during the same week in early August as her scheduled criminal court date. John Duffy, the prominent local defense attorney her parents had borrowed money to hire (he had represented a defendant in the recent Abscam trials) had planned for Gia to get into the state’s Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition (ARD) program for first offenders. ARD offered a second chance without a guilty plea and, eventually, a clean criminal record for staying out of trouble. The strategy backfired when Gia failed to show up and act contrite. “When it came time for her to appear for her ARD hearing, she was in, like, Egypt,” recalled Duffy. “I called for her, and didn’t get any reaction. My secretary called and talked to her stepfather and they said she was in Egypt, doing a shoot, there
was a yacht involved. And then I didn’t hear from her.” A bench warrant was issued for her arrest.
Several weeks later, Gia robbed her mother. Early one morning—about five
A.M.
—Kathleen woke up with a premonition that she should take a look at her well-hidden stash of jewelry. When she checked, she saw that much of it was gone, including several family heirlooms.
Gia had even stolen Kathleen’s wedding ring from her marriage to Joe Carangi. Kathleen never found out whether Gia pawned the wedding ring for drug money or kept it as a tragic memento, because their confrontation about the robbery was brief. When Kathleen came banging on her daughter’s bedroom door just before dawn, Gia seemed to know precisely what she was enraged about and exactly what had to happen next. She hurriedly gathered together a few things and, without saying a word, sprinted out of the house. It was days before she called to let anyone know where she was.
In the meantime, Kathleen and Henry went to the local magistrate in Bucks County to swear out a criminal complaint against Gia. They hoped that an arrest,
another
arrest, might be a way to force her into rehabilitation. “It was the only suggestion that made any sense,” Kathleen recalled. “Any other authority I talked to told me to wash my hands of her. Nobody wanted to touch a heroin addict.” The medical world often had a hard time dealing with heroin addiction. The attitude bubbled up from the hospital emergency rooms, where doctors saw and treated all kinds, but found their Hippocratic oaths most heavily tested by junkies—whose problems seemed utterly self-inflicted, and whose personal strength and integrity seemed as minimal as their chances for recovery. Even in the growing drug and alcohol rehab establishment, junkies were often viewed as untouchables—not “diseased” like those psychologically addicted to substances, but physically dependent and doomed.
“I wanted to get her committed,” Kathleen recalled, “but because of her age and the fact that she was out of my household, I could have gone through the legal process and spent all this money and she could still be out on the street again in twenty-four hours.” The judge issued the warrant, but Gia was never actively pursued. Only a major criminal
in a major city would actually be stalked down in such a situation.
Gia sought refuge with her old Bowie-buddy Toni O’Connor. She moved into Toni’s small apartment in Philadelphia’s Roxborough section—a strongly ethnic neighborhood that had also developed an enclave of working-class lesbians. Toni was working part-time doing quality control for a tool and die company, mostly as a way to cover up her drug dealing, which had switched from Quaaludes—which were now nearly impossible to get—to cocaine. The job was a more comfortable cover than telling people she was a prostitute.
“I was really starting to get hooked on drugs myself at that point,” Toni recalled, “doing a lot of downs to escape reality. I had just met my real dad, who had left when I was five. After not seeing him for years, I saw him at the DCA, screwing around with men friends of mine.
“Gia had nowhere to go, so I let her live with me. She was in bad shape. She had these big lumps from those calluses where she shot up. Plus, her spine had, like, really bad deposits because of drugs—like, cysts coming out on the base of her spine from impurities in the heroin. Rochelle wasn’t around at this point: I guess they had broken up, for a change. Gia was taking methadone. She was in a program in a place in West Philadelphia and she had a counselor and everything. But she was still doing dope. She would go out and lie to me and tell me she wasn’t getting high anymore.
“It was a weird situation because, on the one hand, it was like Gia and I were back together again. We used to go down to this women’s bar, Rainbows, during that time and it was like we were back on top again. But she was fucked up, and not like when we were on Quaaludes in high school. This was different. She just wasn’t herself. When you’re on downs, it’s like, the next morning, you wake up and you’re back to normal. When you’re sticking a needle in your arm, you ‘jones’ for another fix. You’re not gonna kill someone to get another friggin’ Quaalude.”
In a way, their reunion was a return to old Bowie-kid escapades. But every situation had a rougher edge than before: fewer of the stories ended with everyone living happily
ever after. One afternoon in August, Gia and Toni went for a swerving joyride through Center City in Gia’s little red car and were pulled over by police at four-thirty in the afternoon. When Gia’s name was run through police computers her outstanding warrants came up: since she had already posted a thousand dollars bail in her other case, she was released on her own recognizance, pending trials.
And their drug friends were experiencing more than just monumental hangovers. “She was running with a friend of mine, Shelly, a gay guy who used to be the doorman at Catacombs, a mixed, after-hours club under Second Story,” Toni recalled. “They would go over to Camden together to buy heroin. He went over there one time by himself and got shot and killed.”
Toni and Gia bumped into an old friend of Toni’s one night at the East Side Club: it was the woman’s first glimpse of the fabled lesbian model from Philadelphia. “She sure didn’t look like she looked in the magazines,” the woman recalled. “I was so shocked. She had put on some weight and she just looked out of it. She was smoking a cigarette and it was burned down to the filter; she was still holding it and the ashes were dangling. I took the butt from between her fingers, because she was going to burn herself. Toni was just, ‘I’m back with Gia.’ She always thought it was meant to be.”
But Toni knew something was very wrong. “Gia was selling her belongings to buy drugs,” Toni said. “She sold a camera, she sold clothes. She had a bunch of leather clothes from when she was modeling, and I bought them from her. One jacket she had was this beautiful white leather, I gave her two hundred forty dollars for it. But finally, I was supporting her.
“She would come over to a friend’s apartment and lock herself in the bathroom and shoot up, and my friends would get mad. She would shoot the heroin, then she would suck it back out and push it back in and suck it back out. It was like she was having sex with the friggin’ needle. I couldn’t compete with this drug. She had a love affair with the needle.
“She wasn’t happy. She said she had been doing what Kathy wanted her to do. She always felt that her mother
was trying to live her life through her, and she couldn’t allow it to happen anymore. And it’s not that I’m trying to blame Kathy—this is just the way Gia saw it.
“She would say, ‘No one ever asked me what I wanted to do! I never wanted to be a
model.
I wanted to be a
rock star—
like Jim Morrison.’ Everybody always thought it was Bowie with her, but it was the Doors.”
Like many of the hardcore Bowie fans from the early seventies, Gia had tired of the changeling as his work got more commercial and then positively weird. The final straw for a generation weaned on Ziggy had been Bowie’s pronouncement in a
Rolling Stone
interview that he wasn’t gay and never had been: it was the ultimate betrayal of the faith his fans had placed in him. By moving on from Bowie to Blondie to the Doors, Gia was again surfing the wave of mass hip. The LA band, which succumbed with its leader in 1971, was being rediscovered by teenagers as the first classic rock act, prompting the memorable 1981
Rolling Stone
cover “Jim Morrison: He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, He’s Dead.”
“She was obsessed with the Doors: ‘LA Woman,’ ‘Love Her Madly,’ that was Gia,” Toni recalled. “We would lay in bed and she would write out the lyrics to their songs. Basically we would eat and go to bed and that was about it. She was addicted to sausage at that time: eleven o’clock at night she would have to make sausage, breakfast sausage. She could be so funny. Or she’d want to go down to Jim’s for a steak sandwich.
“Finally what happened was I came home one night and she had fallen asleep twisted up in my quilt. It was a new quilt, I had just paid $500 for it, and she fell asleep with a cigarette in her mouth and burned a hole in it. I got really mad and said, ‘I’m not baby-sitting you anymore!’ I was paying for food, clothing and shelter for her. She didn’t even care about taking care of herself. She just made me so angry, I just snapped that night. I ended up throwing her in the shower and being really mad at her.
“And I told her to leave. She wouldn’t. And I was so infuriated, and so out of it on ’ludes myself, that I reached in my purse and pulled out my Mace and
sprayed her in the face.
She cried so bad when I did that, she was like a little kid. I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for doing that,”
she said, beginning to cry. “She didn’t leave until the next morning. She packed her bag, took all her clothes and disappeared.”
In the fall of 1981, Gia went back to New York to lay the groundwork for her comeback. She went to see Monique Pillard at Elite’s offices on East Fifty-eighth Street. In the four years since the model wars broke out, thirty-eight-year-old Monique had far transcended whatever power might have accrued to her had she remained Eileen Ford’s top booker. A year and a half after Wilhelmina’s death, Elite was now running neck and neck with Ford in billings, and Casablancas had all but turned the day-to-day relationships with the girls over to Monique. He was still the visible name and the head talent scout, but he had an empire to build and young models to bed and pajama parties to throw at Xenon. Casablancas’ job was to channel the lustful drives of the world’s male population and get paid for it. Monique was Elite’s Eileen Ford, completing a rise that had begun in the early seventies when the original Eileen Ford had plucked her from the Revlon beauty salon on Fifth Avenue, where Monique had worked since emigrating from France at age fifteen after her parents divorced.