“This is about when Gia started wanting to see me more, getting all nuts about me moving in with her. Before that, I had things balanced. I was seeing this guy in Philadelphia, Ken, who was married, and I was seeing Gia. Gia was away a lot, and I’d only see her on weekends; Ken was married, so I’d see him, like, in the morning or, like, on Sunday. Then, all of a sudden, Ken leaves his wife, Gia leaves modeling and I’m stuck in the middle because I always had time to do both of them before. Nobody knew I was gay. My parents, who lived in North Jersey, certainly didn’t. But Gia took care of that. They really liked Gia; they thought we were friends. Then when I was staying with my parents, and Gia couldn’t get me on the phone, she used to call, starting at like midnight. By like, two, three in the morning, she’d start asking my mother where I was, who I went out with. Then my mother would say, ‘She went with Mark’ or this or that, and then Gia would have a fit.”
Rochelle was taking her share of drugs at the time as well, but she was coming to appreciate the difference between her drug use and Gia’s. “I guess you could have called me a functional addict at that time,” she recalled, “I was using
drugs more than recreationally. To me, if I have my own supply and I’m offering it to other friends of mine or I’m going out at night and I have some in my pocket, that’s not recreational. But it was under control because I still went to college, I still got nice grades, I was still accepted to X-ray technician’s school, and I still handled that and went on with my life.”
Rochelle would recall one incident that crystallized in her mind the difference between her drug use and Gia’s. “We were at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop,” she recalled. “Gia went into the bathroom and she was in the stall and I was going to throw some water on her from the next stall. And I looked over the top and she had the syringe in her hand and she had drawn it up. I said, ‘You put that down or I’m leaving you here!’ And she had it in her hand, and I crawled under the stall and I said, ‘If you don’t put that down, I’m leaving and I’m never speaking to you again.’
“And, believe me, at that time Gia was madly in love with me. She would do
anything
for me. But she would not give me that syringe. And that’s when I knew.”
Even with her prodigious drug intake, Rochelle was amazed by Gia’s voracious drug appetites. “Gia spent an unbelievable amount of money on drugs,” she said. “She could do four bags of heroin at a time. A normal person could do a half a bag and be totally fucked up. She did four bags in one shot, that’s $40, and she’d do a couple shots in an hour. She was spending hundreds a day. She told me that she once spent $40,000 on drugs in a week or two. It had to be coke—nobody could take that much heroin. But I would find bank statements and she would withdraw $1,000, then $3,000, then $5,000, then $10,000—all in the same day.
“Gia had this thing about money. She’d go around with $10,000 in her sock or her shoe, to the point where you could see it if she pulled up her jeans. She’d go down to the shooting galleries like that. When we were in New York, she wouldn’t think twice about spending a couple hundred dollars on dinner. She’d buy three guitars even though she didn’t know how to play them. She’d send me roses—for a while I got roses every day. She was not tight with her money, but she wanted to hold it: she didn’t even like to have it in the bank. She’d buy me clothes, but she always
had to be the one holding the money. She felt that if she gave me money, that would give me power.
“In fact, sometimes when she worried about me leaving her, she used to take the money out of my jeans and hide it from me. I’d say, ‘Gia, where’s the money?’ She’d say, ‘I don’t want you to go anywhere.’ She thought I was powerless without money. I’d say, ‘Gia, I’m leaving, give me the money, I need it to buy gas,’ and she’d say, ‘No, you’re not leaving,’ and physically stop me, hold me to the floor or sit on me.”
While she was trying to keep what was left of her career afloat in New York, Gia had quietly enrolled in an outpatient methadone program in West Philadelphia. “She came in and said she was a top model and
nobody
believed that,” recalled one of her counselors from the program. “Clients
always
fabricated stories of being wealthy, they always wanted you to think they were a lot better as people than the image they were portraying that day. The first day you come in, you’re there most of the day, with lab tests; seeing different people, being evaluated. We all went out to lunch that day and saw she was on the cover of a magazine, in a gown that showed her arms—and she was in our office with track marks on those arms that were unbelievable.
“She indicated that she had been missing job appointments, and that her manager was covering up for her. We didn’t talk much about the career because there was more need to focus on the abuse, but she spoke about how her career caused her problems, how people were still offering her drugs. She knew she would get drugs in return for her work. Usually you try to get a patient to separate themselves from the people they associate with drugs. For her, that was difficult because so many people involved in helping her sustain her heroin problem were in modeling, but she didn’t want to give up her career because it was the only thing she was proud of.
“She came with a young lady—blond hair and short [Rochelle]. They looked like they both could have been into rock, dressed punkish, in black, with little boots on. Gia had an oversized sweater on. They seemed like they were both
coming down off a high. The girl seemed really loyal to Gia. She might have been the motivating factor for her coming in.
“I can remember a conversation amongst us, that we felt that the girl was either a committed friend, or someone who was there because of Gia’s fame and was attempting to be a loyal friend—because Gia seemed to be very freehearted with money or whatever else she had. She seemed to have poor family support, so this was somebody who showed her some sort of caring.”
Her “poor family support” was more like complete family confusion, bafflement and powerlessness. And Gia was, in fact, not the only Carangi kid with drug problems. Her brother Michael had never completely separated from his high school drug culture either. His experimentation had recently climaxed with him going crazy after smoking sensimillan pot laced with PCP. When his mother came to try to calm him down, he pushed her—hard. Unsure of what to do, Kathleen called the police, and swore out an assault charge on her son so he might cool off in jail. Gia was in New York the night this all took place, but was summoned by the family to come and help reason with Michael.
“I was messed up on drugs,” Michael Carangi recalled, “I had a memory loss, I was out of it, out of control. My mother had put me in jail, so, obviously, I didn’t want to hear from her. Gia came down from New York, and when I saw her, I straightened up. It was a bad time for me, but Gia helped me overcome it.”
In the early winter of 1982, Rochelle got into trouble herself. She was living in Philadelphia but commuting to North Jersey, where her parents lived, to log time in a hospital there toward her license as an X-ray technician. One of the characters she knew from Second Story had a proposition for her. He and some friends were making counterfeit money with plates that they had smuggled in from Europe. He wanted her to deliver the plates to someone in Atlantic City. She would be paid, of course, in cash.
“The guy showed me, like,
stacks
of hundreds,” Rochelle recalled. “And he gave me a stack and said, ‘Here, you can have it.’ So, I take the money and I’m really nervous and everything. I mean, there was a
lot
of money. I called a
friend of mine and he came over to my apartment. I had the money and the plates in shoe boxes in the bottom of my closet. We counted it, and there was a quarter of a million dollars there, in fake hundreds. It looked real good. In fact, we spent most of it. We took the money and the plates to Atlantic City and gambled with it. What you do is, you throw the money on the craps table and they don’t look at it, they just push it down the slot and give you chips. So I’m throwing down five hundred dollars a shot, no big deal. You gamble it, you have the chips, you cash them in and then you have cash, real cash.
“Well, I made a mistake. I mixed up a bad hundred-dollar bill with a real hundred-dollar bill and gave it to the teller to get change. Well, the teller checked it and called security. They came running after me, through the casino. I had a red silk outfit on: it was the day before New Year’s Eve and the place was packed. I
ran
out front, got a cab. This was a scene out of a
movie.
I’m trying to shut the door, six security guards coming after me, and I’m yelling at the cab driver,
‘Go, go, go!’
And the cab is going and stopping and going and stopping because they’re all yelling, ‘Stop, stop!’ I got a security guard, this big fat woman, hanging around my waist. We’re still moving, I’m not letting go, right?
“Finally she did yank me out. And the cab driver takes off. So they
get
me, they grabbed my friend, too, and they want to know where the plates are. And I said, ‘Oh, the cab driver got them.’ Of course, I don’t know the cab driver from nothing, but they’re like, ‘Shit, the cab driver!’
“The plates were in the trunk of my friend’s car. I was in jail, just for a night until I got my parents to come and get me. I called somebody from jail and told them where the car was and that somebody should do something. I don’t know exactly what went on, but all I know is that before the Feds got to the trunk, it had already been broken into and I think they got the plates out.
“Gia’s idea was that she was going to take me to Rome to live so I didn’t have to go to jail. She still had some money, and she knew she could work there.”
A week later, the
20/20
segment on modeling finally aired. Across the nation, people knew that Gia was “a virtual symbol
of the bright side and the dark side of modeling” and an admitted drug abuser. But because the program had not been specific about what kind of drug she was admitting to abusing, most viewers assumed it was cocaine—the drug most other models and celebrities admitted to using.
The show didn’t really hurt her career because, in the States, there was little left of her reputation to tarnish. In New York, many of her clients had stopped doing business with her. A handful of people, most notably Scavullo, had yet to be burned by Gia not showing up or showing up high: she decided it was better to keep it that way. She did work one last time with Italian
Bazaar.
“She disappeared for a while,” Lizzette Kattan recalled, “and then one evening the phone rings about midnight and she wants to come over. She came over and that was the first and only time I saw her out of it. Her arms were all marked, she was trying to cover herself. She didn’t want me to see her like that The day after, I was doing a shooting and asked if she wanted to work. She said yes and she slept over. I knew she was completely destroyed, but we didn’t talk about it. During the shooting, she was trembling so terribly that she couldn’t work. She said, ‘I can’t make it,’ and she left, she disappeared. That was the last time I saw her.”
Gia called Diane von Furstenberg one day, desperate for cash. “She asked me for a hundred dollars,” she recalled. “She was in bad shape then. I just gave it to her. What else was I going to do?”
She had a handful of German clients left. But, by that time, in the opinion of her drug counselors, she was working only to support her habit. And she could support it well: two or three trips could yield $20,000 to $30,000, and the German payments were tax-free. Other fringy New York clients bypassed Elite altogether to pay in cash or in drugs.
She did well enough during the Otto Versand trip to the Canary Islands in the fall that they immediately booked her for the spring trip to Tunisia. Monique expected problems, so she insisted that Gia come directly to the Elite office from Philadelphia, without
any
detours. She planned to have someone from Elite escort her to the airport. “I realized that New York was like a total relapse for this girl,” Monique recalled, “so I thought this would work. She was sitting
here in the office and she looked gorgeous.
All we had to do was get her to the airport.
But she disappeared, and I knew that she wouldn’t make it. She called from the airport and said she was okay, but then she got sent home. I don’t know why.”
“We had to send people out to
buy her stuff
in Tunisia,” recalled Heinke Thomsen. “Of course, we didn’t book her again after that.”
Sitting in the airport in Casablanca after being asked to leave the booking, Gia wrote postcards to Monique and Elite controller Jo Zagami.
“Dear Monique, the planes are as slow as the camels. I am waiting for my plane in Casablanca. Otto thinks I’m a fat camel. I hope things are okay! Always, Gia (Sorry, but I don’t think I am fat or unable to concentrate, just confused and jet lagged.).”
“Dear Jo, I hope everything is going well there because I’m coming. They think I am fat. They wish they were as fat as me. What the hell? Always, Gia.”
Monique had been doing what she could to try to set Gia straight. “I’d call her into the office,” she recalled, “and I’d say, ‘What did you do that the client sent you home?’
“‘You tell me,’ she’d say, ‘the client talked to you.’
“‘Well, you fell asleep with a lit cigarette in your hand. What caused that?’
“‘Is that what the client said?’
“You know, like that. She was not nasty. She was tough But not ‘Go fuck yourself tough. She just drew the line and you couldn’t get her to move it. She was a tough little cookie. She didn’t come in and say, ‘Oh yeah, I screwed up.’”
Throughout her time with Elite, Gia was encouraged to seek professional help for her drug problems. Former model Jack Scalia had had particular success at the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, and many models were being sent there to dry out, away from the gossip columnists in New York. Gia, however, refused to go, or even to admit that she had a problem.
“I felt that I could’ve been stronger,” recalled Monique. “I’m not going to say I was the
cause
of Gia doing drugs, but I feel like I should’ve said, ‘Sit down over here and I’m
going to get it out of you, today!’ I’ve been working with other people here who got involved with drugs. All it takes is for them to get married, to have a baby or meet a nice guy and realize that this is a job and tomorrow there’s something else. But with her, I never knew.”