The cover photo itself suggested that she would be wise to begin laying groundwork quickly for that next career. “What she was doing to herself finally showed in the pictures,” recalled Sean Byrnes. “It was kind of sad. We got her on the cover, but I could see the change in her beauty. There was an emptiness in her eyes.”
Albert Watson also continued to use Gia. Because his work and his work style were so much more commercial than many of his high fashion contemporaries, Watson still wasn’t as well-known as some of the French Mafia photographers. But as the fashion world began appreciating business acumen, his dependable talents were becoming more recognized and his pictures were actually growing
more
interesting. Once criticized for being a jack-of-all-visual-trades, Watson was now being recast as a good influence on a fashion world gone mad. Although he was known for not getting mixed up in people’s personal lives, Watson knew as much about Gia’s problems as almost anyone in the business did. Besides doing a good bit of work with her over the years, Watson and his wife were professionally close to Sandy Linter. Gia still wasn’t completely over Sandy: she occasionally relapsed into calling and wooing the makeup artist.
During her comeback, Gia worked with Watson more than almost any other photographer. And, for a while, his work habits appeared to be rubbing off on her. Gia was doing her best to be extremely businesslike about modeling—showing up on time, sending flowers to anyone who did her a favor. Avedon called her in for a look and booked her for the upcoming round of Gianni Versace ads—the fall ‘82 campaign would be shot around Easter. There wasn’t much high fashion editorial work, but she had a steady stream of catalog and department store ad requests. Besides the regular print clients, she was meeting with casting directors for commercials and movies. On a typical day, she was now mixing go-sees and callbacks with jobs—not unlike the beginning of her career, except the jobs were for top money and the callbacks for campaigns. On April 5, she worked all
day for Avedon, earning $2,500, and then left the studio for a second callback for a Silkience shampoo ad.
After several months of commuting, Gia started looking for a new apartment in New York. She found one she liked in Greenwich Village, in the same Horatio Street building where Harry King lived, and made an application on April 8. That evening, she went to Scavullo’s studio for an important television taping.
The ABC program
20/20
was putting together a report on the modeling business. They had asked Gia, through Monique at Elite, if she would agree to be interviewed for the segment. It was a difficult decision, because it was clear that the reporter had some knowledge of Gia’s drug problem and would probably ask her about it. Monique told Gia that if she wasn’t afraid of exposing the fact that she took drugs, the show might be a good opportunity for publicity. Her true confession might even help someone.
The evening went as smoothly as possible, considering that Scavullo booked Sandy Linter to do the makeup and Gia didn’t get on well with the crew. They first wanted to film her walking down the street toward the studio. When she did, they asked her to walk differently, slower. “This is the pace I walk at,” she explained, but they insisted on documenting her walking the way
they
wanted.
The crew filmed Gia being made up by Sandy, having her hair done by Harry King and being photographed by Scavullo. Then they sat her down for an interview. The reporter began by waxing rhapsodic about the way she seemed to change her very being when in front of the camera. “I have to,” Gia said. “I become whatever your eye wants to see. It’s my job. I’m a fashion model, that’s how I do my job.” Without any more warm-up than that, he jumped to the delicate subject of how Wilhelmina’s death had affected her. “I felt very close to Wilhelmina,” Gia explained, in a pained voice. “It was a great loss for me …”
“Cut!” the cameraman yelled. “She’s licking her lips!”
The reporter asked her to answer the emotional question about Wilhelmina again. “She helped me when I had just started,” Gia explained, “as a friend she helped me. She was extremely intelligent, she was just a great person to have in my life … her death was a terrible loss to me …”
When the interview came around to her recent career problems, the reporter phrased his questions in a way that made Gia feel like she had been ambushed. “At one point you got kind of into the drug scene, didn’t you?” he asked. After she awkwardly answered, he followed up with another leading question: “It almost destroyed you, didn’t it? You thought more than once about packing it in, didn’t you?”
“Yes, you could say that I did,” she admitted. “But I thought about that [suicide] also without drugs. Now I have a great lust for life, you could say, and I love life and it’s a wonderful feeling and I think I had to go through [that] in order to have this feeling I have for life right now.” The interviewer even set her up to seek audience absolution for her drug use by asking, “You’re free of it, aren’t you, now?” But it was too late: she was already completely frazzled. Then she paused after being asked if she was happy with her career, and he made a big thing out of it. The whole interview hadn’t gone the way she planned at all.
The next day, a Friday, Gia was doing Versace ads with Avedon. The campaign was expanding to larger group shots that had to be done on a stage rather than in Avedon’s studio. The series culminated with an extravagant shot of twelve top models draped over each other in an orgy of gold lamé and black leather. Gia was at the very front of the quivering mass, closest to the camera, a fallen angel in spaghetti-straps. “It was the most significant photo of the whole period of our company,” recalled Versace’s Paul Beck.
But the successful Avedon shooting didn’t help Gia get over the feeling that the
20/20
interview had been a big mistake. She called Monique and the segment’s producer Bob Wallace on Monday to see if
20/20
could be pressured into eliminating her section. “I yelled at that person,” recalled Monique, “I said, ‘You sorta tricked her.’” But no matter how often the agency or Gia called, the
20/20
producers refused to withhold the interview.
Otto wanted a make-over. Like the rest of the German fashion industry, the gigantic, Hamburg-based Otto Versand catalog company—the Spiegel of Deutschland—was trying to upgrade its dowdy image. Otto had added a new higher-end
catalog called Apart and was trying to attract some of the top American high fashion models whose faces were slowly becoming known to German women because of the new German
Vogue.
But the international fashion world had little respect for German aesthetics. “Working for German clients” was becoming an industry catchphrase for earning quick money making mediocre pictures of really bad clothes.
Germany had one internationally legitimate fashion designer, Jil Sander, one resident photographic legend, F. C. Gundlach, the so-called Avedon of Germany, and several other major women’s magazines, like
Petra
and
Brigitte,
that covered higher fashion. But German women were still very dependent on catalog shopping: they had helped turn catalog companies Otto Versand and Neckerman into massive operations and had recently embraced the new upscale Escada catalog, with a line designed by former top German model Margarithe Lieberson. Because German magazines had far less cachet than their European counterparts—and the powerful German catalogs were, after all, still catalogs—German clients often had to pay more than anyone else when they decided it was time to use the top American models and photographers. These high rates were especially attractive because Germany did not tax freelance wages like France, where the government took a huge bite out of foreigners’ fees and were somewhat more strict about reporting.
European jobs had always been a good way to generate cash. The American girls could demand that the local agencies pay them in full before they returned home, and it was entirely up to the models to report their European earnings to the American IRS—which many of them didn’t bother to do.
But Germany was becoming an especially soft touch. Many German magazines still paid models and photographers directly, in cash, although German
Vogue
and some of the bigger catalogs now paid through the agents.
In the great German tradition of efficiency, these high-paid catalog jobs were also booked months in advance: the catalog clients paid for “options” on the girls’ time to assure their shootings went according to schedule. But even with the higher fees and options, it wasn’t easy for German clients to book the top girls, especially if they wanted them to
actually come to Germany. German fashion quickly became known as the pinnacle of European open-mindedness: a refuge for models who were slightly past their peak, or had problems.
It came as no surprise to the industry that Gia became one of the first top American models to work for Otto Versand. She had done work for German
Vogue,
and she was no longer in a position to turn down $10,000 for twelve days’ work, even if half the clothes had decorative piping like couture lederhosen. Otto Versand did shootings all over the world. The exotic locations were not chosen for scenery—the backgrounds were never included in the catalog shots—but for the intensity of the sunlight, which, according to company research, improved the appearance of the garments. Her first sitting for the company began April 16, in Newport Beach, California.
When Gia left for the West Coast, the
20/20
situation still hadn’t been resolved, and she had started calling Sandy again. She wrote “last time I will call her” in her datebook and hoped that a trip away would distract her attention.
Gia had a handful of friends in Los Angeles that she was hoping to see. A small part of the modeling business had shifted to the West Coast when Wilhelmina and Elite set up offices there, joining the traditional flow of actors, directors and writers from New York to LA. One favorite hangout for the younger Beautiful People was the Roxy Theater on the Sunset Strip. The private club above the Roxy, On the Rox, was an epicenter of the LA sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll scene—which was still in shock over the March 5 death of John Belushi, the king of its party animals. Gia had become friendly with Elmer Valentine, a co-owner of the Roxy as well as co-owner of the fabled Whisky-A-Go-Go down the Strip. The first important rock club in LA during the sixties, the Whisky had spawned groups like the Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and grew into a major music-celebrity gathering place, the Cotton Club of Southern California.
Valentine was a middle-aged ex-Chicago vice cop with a reputation for always showing up with a gorgeous girl or two on his arm, but he generally remained behind the scenes
at his clubs. Most of what the general public knew about Valentine came from his cameo appearance in the 1980 hagiography of Jim Morrison,
No One Here Gets Out Alive.
During the Doors’ formative years, Valentine continually booked the band as an opening act and continually fired them for swearing on-stage and playing so loud that they blew away the headliners. In a drunken rage, Morrison was known to hop up on-stage between sets and yell, “Fuck Elmer, fuck the Whisky!”
Gia made plans to drive up to LA from Newport to see Elmer during her free time. He always treated her well, showed her the town, took her out, made her feel protected. “She was unhappy,” Valentine recalled. “She didn’t like people coming on to her all the time. She couldn’t handle the bullshit and the model-fuckers. She stayed with me a few times over the years. I gave her money when she asked for it: typical junkie stuff.”
The Otto Versand sittings were considerably less glamorous than doing the Paris collections for
Vogue,
and Gia was having a difficult time. On the second day of the shooting, Gia got her period and, after hours standing in the hot sun, nearly blacked out. Then four of the other models were canceled when they arrived at the booking, so Gia had to wait a day while replacements were ordered. At the end of the long days Gia shopped—buying clothes and books by Hermann Hesse and Nietzsche—or went to LA to see Elmer. As the shootings continued, the other models were making Gia increasingly uncomfortable.
“The other models seem to resent me,” she wrote in her datebook. “Is it jealousy or [are] all girls just like that … I get the feeling a few of them would like to pull my hair out. Why don’t I get those feelings toward other girls … sometimes they say things that are quite nasty and rude. I think it is a terrible part of the human race, a real flaw. I thought we all were suppose[d] to love one another …”
The day before she went home, Gia went to LA. “Hung out at On The Rox,” she scribbled, “went up to Elmer’s pad, got totaled, then went to Whiskey A-Go-Go to see the Motels. Got Elizabeth [another model] and her three boyfriends in … she gave me a pink rose (I like her) turned them on to C. Me and Elmer had fun.”
On her last day in LA, Elmer took Gia shopping, buying her three jackets and a couple of books. They had lunch at The Palm and he showed her around Hollywood. “I have to go back to LA to work out of Elite and get to know the town,” she wrote in her datebook on the plane trip back. “I think it could very easily be a favorite city of mine.
“Here I sit in my new but old Marine sergeant’s jacket … feeling very set apart from the other humans. But I am finally really starting to dig being different. Maybe I am discovering who I am. Or maybe I am just stoned again Ha Ha Ha Ha.”
Even though she had just earned $10,000 and could certainly afford a limo back to Bucks County, she had her parents come pick her up at the airport. “Henry will meet me at JFK,” she wrote on the plane, “and hopefully Mommy will be with him.”
On May 3, Gia moved back to New York, her comeback certain enough that signing a lease on an apartment seemed justified. Henry helped her move her things. “Think I am going to love it here,” she wrote. “Cool out from the dope pal.” Life in the West Village was different than uptown or the just-emerging East Village. It was a friendly place to walk around, window shop, get coffee. It was more like the areas of Center City Philadelphia she had always liked. The buildings, and the people, seemed to be on a more human scale. In the Village she always seemed to bump into someone on the way to wherever she was going.