The matronly, round Frenchwoman—who had done little in her years in New York to lose her heavy accent—was settling into her role as the industry’s new power-mom, a time-honored position with some interesting new twists. Monique’s maternal and commercial instincts had to be carefully balanced, sometimes even entangled. When confronted with the possibility of signing Gia, who had already been blacklisted by all the other major agencies, Monique had to consider two questions. Was
she
the one who could save this poor girl, and her multimillion-dollar look? And was the incredible risk worth taking, in light of the recent defections of Kim Alexis, Christie Brinkley and Anna Anderson, and the near-defection of Carol Alt?
“Everyone knew about the problems Gia had,” said Monique. “I had heard all about her from the other girls. What she was looking for was the mother image that she lost with Wilhelmina. I understood she went to Ford and missed a couple of bookings and Eileen threw her out. When I first
met her, she wasn’t looking that great. But she was so beautiful. She was sitting in this little cubicle office, and I could not take my eyes off that face. I knew all the things she had done, all the stunts she had pulled. But I was still thinking, ‘I can’t believe she’s sitting next to me, this really incredible-looking girl, this really special girl.’
“I said, ‘John, I want to take this girl.’ He said there was no doubt about her beauty, but did I really want to take her on? My assistant, Oscar, who was at Wilhelmina when Gia started there, said, ‘Monique,
she’s a legend.’
“She always wore long sleeves. The first day she came in here I asked her to roll up her sleeve and show me her arm, and she wouldn’t. But I loved her look and I thought I could make her work.”
Unlike some of the other agencies, Elite wasn’t even pretending to confront models about their drug problems: after all, Casablancas was fond of saying he preferred models who partied a little too much to those who didn’t party enough. “We didn’t know much about drugs then,” recalled Elite controller Jo Zagami, who had come from Ford with Monique and also had an underlined Bible somewhere in her desk. “Unfortunately, we learned a lot from Gia. We tried to help her, and she always said, ‘Why are you taking this time with me?’ She couldn’t accept that people cared for her. I recall reaching out my hand to Gia once, to get her to take my hand. She just looked at it, and then slapped it.
“The mother, I recall, didn’t want to know what was going on. It was just us.” Even after all that had taken place, Kathleen still trusted that the agency probably knew best when it came to Gia’s welfare in New York. And Gia would only be in New York to work, because she was going to stay around Philadelphia and commute up only when she had a job. The arrangement was a way to keep her away from the temptations of the New York drug scene, but still get her modeling career back on track. Kathleen was certain that if Gia could reclaim her position as a supermodel, everything else would work itself out.
Elite’s signing of Gia raised a few eyebrows. “I shouldn’t think that a modeling agency would take a girl on if they knew she was using heroin,” said Harry King. “They knew? They took her on knowing that she was a heroin addict?
Oh, that’s marvelous. Well, they’re businessmen up there. I’m sure they thought, ‘This girl could make money for us.’ It’s not a rehabilitation center, you know.”
“The thing about Gia was that, if she showed up and she was in one piece, the pictures that came out were still incredible,” recalled Monique. And the few pictures that had been published in 1981 certainly bore out that opinion: a stunning Italian
Vogue
cover, Albert Watson shots in French and German
Vogue,
and the last remaining Your Dior shot. Also lingering in the magazines during her hiatus was a shot for a one-third-page ad for a North Jersey company called Royal Silk, which sold silk T-shirts and lingerie through magazine coupons and a catalog. They had hired Gia after seeing several of her
Cosmo
covers, because they knew that “anyone who worked for
Cosmo
would work for us.” The more fashionable catalogs like Spiegel—for which Gia had worked—usually took new pictures each season, repeating only a handful of photos of long-selling items. A company like Royal Silk, with a fairly stable product line, didn’t have or need that luxury: a successful photo session could produce pictures that would work season after season. The strip ad with Gia wearing their green silk T-shirt would run in
Vogue
and
Cosmo
for years.
In mid-December, Toni O’Connor got a call from Gia. She was living with her mother again: Kathleen had taken her back and, because she seemed to be doing better, didn’t notify the authorities. Gia and Toni spoke a couple of times on the phone, and finally made plans to get together for New Year’s Eve. Gia would be bringing Rochelle, who Toni knew only by sight and reputation from the clubs. Toni went out to Plage Tahiti, a chic women’s store around the corner from her new apartment in a Center City high rise, and bought an expensive black tuxedo dress just for the occasion.
Gia and Rochelle arrived in the early evening, and the three began to party. Toni thought the plan was to get high and go over to Second Story to dance. But besides the plan, there was also a plot.
“So she and Gia came over and we were drinking a bottle of wine,” Toni recalled. “I gave them Quaaludes and we did some coke. I was really high. If you pushed me, I’d fall
down. And before I knew it, Rochelle had punched me out and tied me up. I was wearing a dress with a cummerbund: she tied up my hands with that. She cut my telephone cords, put this school bag over my head with a drawstring and tried to choke me to death.
“Then she started sticking her hand up my dress and like, without being explicit, she started sticking her finger up me until I bled. And she just kept punching me in the face, ’til I had a lump the size of an egg.
“Gia was just sitting there watching. Rochelle kept saying, ‘Oh, Gia, let’s throw her out the window,’ and Gia just said, ‘No, I can’t.’ I think Gia was in shock; she didn’t know what to do. Rochelle had such control over her. They ended up stealing, like, two hundred dollars from me—gold, jewelry, leather, the leather stuff I had bought from Gia. Then they left me there, with my stereo blasting a Go-Go’s record. I finally got myself out of the bed and called the police. I just remember being in a catatonic position, just rocking back and forth and crying, sitting on my living room floor, like I can’t believe someone did this to me. It was the most devastating experience I ever went through in my life.”
Toni eventually decided not to press charges because she feared retribution from Gia’s father—who she mistakenly believed had Mafia connections because he was Italian and in the food business. But she did make sure that everyone she knew found out about what had happened.
“Everybody heard the story because I took the dress back to Plage the next week and exchanged it for a leather jacket,” she recalled. “I felt I had to get rid of the dress. I knew the people that worked there and I told them why I wanted to trade it in. I wanted people to know the story, because I wanted people to know how evil Rochelle was. She’s possessed by the devil. I feel sorry for her: people who do things like that don’t get away with it. She’s a sick woman. The cruelest thing I ever did in my life was spray Gia in the face; maybe she was trying to pay me back for that.”
Rochelle remembered the incident a little differently. “Toni O’Connor had kept Gia’s clothes and we went there to get them,” she said. “Gia and I went up on New Year’s Eve, and we packed a bag with socks and ropes and hand
ties and all kinds of things. We planned this whole thing. Gia had told Toni she was going to go out with her, only Gia brought me over with her. We went up and we got her high and we tied her up and took all her clothes off and stuffed socks in her mouth and stole all of Gia’s clothes back, the leathers and all the stuff that Toni wouldn’t let Gia have back. We took all that stuff out and we left her there tied up. It was pretty funny.
“And we left the music playing. ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ by the Go-Go’s, and it kept playing and playing. Every time I hear that song now I think, Oh my God! I think of what we did that night. It was wild. We did some wild things.”
I
n January, Elite’s 1982 headsheets and cards came out. In the war of the agency promo materials, they now came in an elaborately printed softbound book. Gia took her place on the roster of Elite’s 1982 stars: Carol Alt, Andie (MacDowell), Bitten, Kim Charelton, Janice and Debbie Dickinson, Nancy Donahue, Kelly Emberg, Iman, Lena Kansbod, Paulina (Porizkova), Phoebe (Cates), Joan Severance and Tara Shannon. Among Elite’s lesser girls in their “Model Management” division were Kim Delaney, Kathy Ireland, Kelly Lynch and Sela Ward.
Gia was determined to remake a name for herself in modeling. She was met in New York by both the people who had never succumbed to the drug and drinking culture, and those who had already reached their own personal bottoms, disappeared to gather themselves and returned to see just how many bridges they had burned.
Predictably, the industry was most forgiving of those furthest behind-the-camera, whose problems had been best hidden from the public eye. The national economy would also help many
fashionistas
in their attempts to reenlist. The model wars and the boom in the designer ready-to-wear business had never fallen victim to the Carter recession—asking prices had continued to escalate through difficult financial times. As Reagan’s voodoo economics waived rules for the wealthy and unfunded the impoverished, the rich got
richer and a generation of young professionals were rewarded for voting (and living) their pocketbooks. The U.S. economy began to come back, the dollar became stronger against European currencies, and businesses grew with the rising fortunes of the American fortunate. There would be more magazines, more boutiques, more brand names, more ad campaigns, more job descriptions. There would also be more work for those who could compete in a bigger-money fashion world where someone like Calvin Klein was no longer a fashionista-made-good but the leader of a multinational corporation, a rich industrialist.
But it was hardest for the models to come back—if they still only wanted to be models. They were expendable to begin with, their obsolescence planned for by everyone but themselves. Their contacts and track records were significant, but too much experience could reinforce the easily formed impression that a girl was past her prime. When Gia came to see Sara Foley—who had “gone away” herself and reemerged in the agency of Patrick Demarchelier’s rep Bryan Bantry—the old pictures in her new Elite book only reminded the agent how amazing one of her favorite models
used to
look.
“I remember when Gia tried to make a comeback, she used to carry that nude behind the fence around in her portfolio,” said Foley. “She came up to see me, and there was something very sad about it. She had this portfolio, and the picture, and she was so proud of it …”
But for every person who proclaimed Gia “over,” there was another thrilled by the prospect of working with someone of her stature. It would not be easy for her to generate a lot of tony, high-fashion work. Clients who were once thrilled to take whatever time she had free now wanted her to come by so they could see her first, or even take a few Polaroids. In some ways, Gia was being put through the rigors of rejection that she had avoided during her initial rise. But, as Monique had guessed, there were still many clients willing to book her, sight unseen, because she was Gia. And now that she was joining the Screen Actors Guild and trying to get more TV commercial work, other things besides her beauty and her reputation as a print model would affect her success. If she could charm ad agency representatives
during the numerous call-backs required for each TV commercial, her slightly faded beauty would not hold her back.
One of her first jobs after returning to active duty was generously provided by Scavullo. He agreed to give her a
Cosmo
cover-try. “He did that because he was a very kind man and he felt sorry for her,” recalled Harry King. “Scavullo had had people very close to him be involved with drugs before.”
She was shot stuffed into a strapless Fabrice party dress, her hands tucked beneath her. Way Bandy did the best he could with Gia’s makeup, Harry King did the same with her hair. The camera angle was meant to minimize the bloating caused by the methadone and the weight gain from the sweets junkies often crave. The pose was designed to cover the gory abscess on her hand—an actual tunnel leading directly into her bloodstream—about which she still hadn’t seen a doctor. “That thing on her hand” quickly became an industry metaphor for what Gia had done to herself. It was a self-inflicted stigmata that she continually picked back open, like a child unable to keep her hands off a scab on a scraped knee.
Scavullo convinced
Cosmo
to use the shot of Gia for the cover of the April 1982 issue. She was also interviewed for the magazine’s “This Month’s
Cosmo
Cover Girl” feature, recently created to respond to the growing public interest in fashion models. Gia told the interviewer that “a model has to
create
moods. You have to be careful not to get stuck in a mood—emotions have trends just like fashion.” She noted the difficulty of staying in the mood. “How am I supposed to
feel
beautiful if they give me an ugly dress, plastic jewelry, and an atrocious hairdo so tight it could cause brain damage? … sometimes I’ve felt like
running
out of a shoot—I had to contain myself—but the pictures turned out nice. Often, the idea that you don’t look good is all in your head.”
Gia talked about the difficulties of delivering on the promises fashion photographs appeared to make. “[People] see you as an ideal of fashion,” she explained, “it’s hard to live up to that image. When I get out of work, I throw on a T-shirt, jeans and my sneaks just to get back down to earth.” And she said she envisioned herself in “a job where I can be
out
of the limelight making things happen, possibly cinematography. Modeling is a short gig—unless you want to be jumping out of washing machines when you’re thirty!”