Gia got in touch with Sharon Beverly and began spending time with her. Sometimes they would hang out at Patricia Field’s store on East Eighth Street, or just go out for dinner. On the way to Sharon’s apartment one evening, Gia ran into some people she knew who took her over to the Ritz to see a band. “We went into the semiprivate lounge,” she wrote, “while waiting to pee I met a cute little Italian boy who offered me some coke. Then I danced by myself. It was a good dance.”
After her first few weeks of living in the Village, Gia returned home for her mother’s birthday. “Got up about six, Snort,” she wrote in her datebook about the day. “Bought some beautiful pink and purple flowers and a card
with poppies on the cover. On the inside, wrote a little letter to Mom, having to do with our personalities and getting along and the special love I have for my mother. She is a
real
sweetheart. Definitely.
“Went to dinner with Mom and Henry. He is, as usual, grossing me out. He is so cheap. When the bill came he was going to figure out how much my share was. After I had taken him out to dinner in NY at a more expensive place. Boy. Man.”
While Gia was at home, she finally had the abscess on her hand taken care of. “The fellow I took her to,” recalled Kathleen, “looked at her and said there was a tunnel in her hand. He was horror-stricken, and it’s
something
when you see a doctor who has been deeply moved. He said, ‘You never told me it was that bad.’ But that was the reaction we always got. Nobody would ever believe her drug problems were as bad as they were, because people don’t realize that people who look clean and well-to-do and knowledgeable could have that much of a problem.”
Since she had the surgery done as an outpatient, she was able to return to New York the same day. She went out for a walk in the spring air with her shooting gallery pal Raul, and ran into Ariella, a makeup artist she had worked with many times, and a hairdresser she had worked with once. “I don’t know why,” she wrote, “but Ariella was being very rude and crass towards me. So was the hairdresser whom I don’t even know. They were actually laughing at me. All I said was my apartment gave me the feeling of seclusion. They asked me all sorts of caddy [catty] questions. I don’t understand why they’re so nice to me when I work with them. Well, I knew they weren’t my friends. But they don’t have to be my enemies either. Raul slept over—I think he is my friend.”
Several days later, Gia went out with friends to one of the newer downtown clubs, Danceteria, and then over to the Continental, an after-hours club in an old garage on the far West Side, where she bumped into makeup artist Lesley Browning.* “Lesley started to tell me that Thomas stood her up,” Gia wrote, “she had brought her bag with her overnight things. She said she didn’t have a place to stay. I told her she could stay at my place. We went to breakfast
and then to my home. Watched TV and smoked some dope. She is so beautiful, her skin is so white. I think I am falling in love. I wished I could have stayed in bed with her all day. But I had to go to Germany. I waited till the last minute to tell her which I think was wrong on my part. I want to take care of her so much. I hope that she comes and stays with me. I need her and I think she needs me. I hope she lets me help her.”
When she got to her hotel room in Munich, Gia started to cry. She hadn’t really wanted to do the trip for German
Vogue,
the flight had been grueling and she was still getting over her sleepless night with Lesley, who she already missed terribly. Since she didn’t have Lesley’s phone number, Gia called several people back in New York to try to get it. When that was unsuccessful, she got the number of the makeup artist’s agent and called unsuccessfully several times. The next morning, as Gia ate breakfast in the hotel before the sitting with Bill King, Lesley called and was patched through to the house phone in the lobby. “She is such a sweetheart,” Gia wrote. “I can’t stop thinking of her. She better not be sleeping with anyone else but me cause she is really going to upset me if she does. I am such a sucker for a pretty girl that 1 like.”
From that point on, Gia worked sporadically for her few established clients. Her last photographs in American
Vogue
—only her fourth appearance in the two years since the disastrous Scavullo sitting in Southampton—appeared in the September 1982 issue, just a few pages before the excerpt from Bert Stern’s upcoming book
The Last Sitting.
For the September 1962 issue of American
Vogue,
Stern had done what became the last photo sessions with Marilyn Monroe, at the Bel-Air Hotel in Beverly Hills. Only a handful of the photos had been published at the time: before she died, Monroe had vetoed many of the contact sheets and physically destroyed some of the color slides sent for her approval. On the twentieth anniversary of the sitting, Stern put together a book of the photographs and his memories of the sessions. Most of his recollections concerned getting Monroe drunk on Dom Pérignon and Château-Laflte-Roth-schild, getting her to take her clothes off and, during the
last session, when she was nearly unconscious, passing up his opportunity to have sex with her. “She nestled closer,” he wrote. “The energy between us was pure magic. We were inches away from pure erotic pleasure. She wanted to make love. She was ready. I was the one who stopped.”
Gia was booked for the spring 1983 round of Versace ads—which were being shot in the fall of 1982, just as the last batch were making their predictable sensation. But she left the session before any usable pictures could be taken of her. “I forget what the problem was exactly,” recalled Versace’s Paul Beck. “The clothes were for the following summer, they showed a lot of skin and everything. She was very thin. The clothes didn’t fit, or she didn’t feel well or something.”
From then on Gia worked mostly for German clients. She was joined in the German catalog shoots by other top models like Janice Dickinson, Andie MacDowell and Carol Alt—often in outfits, hairstyles and poses so preposterous that even Otto Versand booker Heinke Thomsen had to chuckle, “I’m glad sometimes the models don’t see the catalog.”
Through the jobs for the German clients, Gia became friendlier with Janice Dickinson. “I know Janice was very much friendly with Gia,” recalled Monique Pillard, “because I know they sent a lot of messages back and forth through me and they did trips together.” Janice was going through her own model craziness. She was having drug problems, for which she would eventually go through several rehab programs. But she was also going through “this sex thing” as many of her colleagues called it. After she broke up with Reinhardt, she got involved with a male model and regularly regaled friends and acquaintances alike with diatribes about his sexual prowess—how she “never had sex like that before.”
She also veered into what fellow
fashionistas
referred to as “Janice’s nude period,” when she began posing naked even when she wasn’t asked to. “I remember during her serious nudity phase,” said Lizzette Kattan, “we were at the
alta moda
and suddenly the police came and asked for my help. Janice had taken all her clothes off and jumped into
the fountain at the Grand Hotel and the traffic was stopping for people to see.”
While Janice was more flamboyant with her problems than most top models, she was hardly alone with them. “These models have a very big sex problem,” said Monique Pillard. “They are made like the goddesses of the world. I mean, oh my God, can you
imagine?
And all of a sudden they have hang-ups about themselves, very anti-men hangups, and what happens is they go crazy half of the time, because they don’t feel intimately at home within themselves. They’re afraid they can’t perform as the picture makes them [appear to] perform … you get these girls who look
wow,
you know. And this girl feels thoroughly inadequate in her private intimate life.”
Bob Hilton would later write a graduate school paper on the psychology of beautiful women—based solely on his experiences with models. His theory was that if women were rewarded for nothing except for having good looks, they turned “self-indulgent, willful and nasty.”
Gia got the chance to do an armchair psychoanalysis of herself as her contribution to
Scavullo Women.
The handsome coffee table book was finally published in early November of 1982, and included photos and interviews with dozens of women but prominently showcased color before-and-after photos of only five: Elizabeth Taylor, Patti Hansen, Kim Alexis, Beverly Johnson and Gia. Unlike the others, who looked surprisingly plain without makeup and glamorous with, Gia looked naturally stunning in her “before” shot, but terribly overdone and almost fearful in the “after.”
Scavullo had edited out some of Gia’s most candid comments, for fear they would hurt her career, and he gave her the benefit of considerable doubt by insisting that her drug problems were far behind her. “It wasn’t just a matter of stopping,” she said.
It was a matter of wanting to live in the world that I live in and making it work for me instead of against me. I think the reason someone gets into something like that is because—for me, anyway—there were a lot of
unanswered questions in my mind about work and about life. Money didn’t interest me. I got to a point where I had all this money. I had everything I ever wanted in life—or thought that I wanted—and I said, “What the hell is this all for?” I mean, I need money to survive. But I think people value it too much. The world seems to be based on money and sex. And I’m looking for better things than that, like happiness and love and caring.
I was really down on society, but then I found that I was part of society too, and for me to be doing drugs made me just as bad as I thought society was. I think maybe society is kind of what I make myself. And that makes me happy, happier than being high. If anything, I’m high on being straight because now I can feel my body, I can feel my head. Before, I was like numb. It’s just really selfish. I don’t care if you’re on Quaaludes or you’re a nice housewife hooked on diet pills and Valium, it’s just a selfish way to live. I learned a lot from my experience, so I don’t regret it. It was good for me, like a slap in the face … I’m an extremist, you know. I had to go all the way.
[Now] I’m disciplining myself. If I have a booking, I plan for it the day before, I have to. If I didn’t, and if I were late or didn’t show up or something, they’d think I was goofing off, so the thing is to make sure I’m together and that I get enough sleep. I’m basically a night person, so it’s hard for me to go to bed at a normal hour. Then, in the morning, I just want to keep sleeping. I don’t want to get out of that bed because I’m hiding in that bed; it’s so nice and warm. I’ve had this problem all my life. It’s why I was always late … I was really spoiled, you know. I was a brat. And that stays with you. It’s a hard thing to change. But once you know mese things about yourself, you have to try to discipline yourself, because after a certain age nobody else is going to do it for you.
When you’re in demand, and people are saying “I want you, I want you,” it isn’t easy to say no. I don’t like to disappoint people. I’m basically a satisfier. So you find yourself working a lot—
a lot.
And if you want
to take a day off, because you need a day to rest or to get yourself together and have your energy for the next day, it’s hard. Models are never supposed to be down or be tired or have a headache. They’ve got to be up all the time.
You know, I thank God that I’m good-looking, or that people think I’m good-looking. But there’s a lot more to it than makeup and prettiness and all that stuff … there’s a lot more to being a woman than that. When I look in the mirror, I just want to like myself, that’s all. And if I like myself, then I look good.
Scavullo then finished the Gia section of the book with his own editorial comment. When he had penned the words almost a year before, they seemed like hopeful encouragement. Now they were sad, almost mocking. “Gia has got to be liking herself a lot these days,” he wrote.
Even though her career was deteriorating, she was still making enough money to live in New York and carry on a long-distance relationship with Rochelle—in between her occasional crushes, like Lesley, which usually ended up as one-night or one-week stands. Gia had her German clients, and residuals from work she had done with Elite and Wilhelmina. “She’d hide in her apartment and stay home to be with me,” Rochelle recalled. “It wasn’t always because of drugs that she missed jobs. It just didn’t mean that much to her. If it was a sunny day and she was supposed to be somewhere, she would just decide we were going to Fire Island. She would tell me that she had called and canceled her booking, and then we were up in a helicopter going to Fire Island. We’d come back at night and go out to have a drink somewhere and somebody would come up to Gia and say, ‘Where the hell were you?’ And then I realized she hadn’t ever called. But I’d look at her and she’d look at me through her hair—which was always over her eyes—and what could I do?
“Sometimes, of course, drugs were the problem. One Christmas we were in New York and I had about $50 on me and Gia was getting sick. I was feeling bad, so I figured I’d give her money to get straight. We drove down and
parked on Avenue C and Fourth Street and she disappeared, she slipped away. I went back to the apartment and she showed up later. We had a horrible fight. She wanted to sell the TV to get more heroin. She didn’t want to work for the money. She was always worried that people she worked for would know she was high. She wouldn’t go near there if she didn’t feel she looked good—and she became paranoid. So then we would stay in for three days and drink grape soda and watch cartoons or movies.
“When Gia’s mom would come up to New York, which she did frequently, I would have something else to do that day. I knew they wanted to spend time together and that Gia didn’t really want her mom to know about me. Later I would come home with her on holidays, and her mom’s attitude toward me depended on how well Gia’s modeling was going. When she was doing good, they were thrilled she was there, happy to see us. ‘Look at my baby,’ her mother would say. If Gia was down, it was almost like we weren’t welcome to join into what was going on. We’d spend the whole day in Gia’s room.