Thing of Beauty (47 page)

“She was blatantly homosexual and proud of it. Me, I didn’t say it so much, I was more bisexual I guess. I didn’t let everybody in the straight community know like she would, only the gay community, and only when I went out with her. And, you know, since she was ‘Gia the model,’ people used to try and be friendly to me to get to her. So I was quite satisfied to stay in the house. We really had a good relationship when we were just with each other. But we would go out to the gay clubs and restaurants down on New York Avenue: the Saratoga, Studio 6, The Brass Rail.

“Gia didn’t really understand men. She never really did understand the man/woman relationship and the way men think—maybe because she just thought of herself as a guy, too. She would talk about men, like, they were her buddies. I’d say, ‘Gia,
no,
they’re not your buddies.’ When I met her, she claimed she had never had sex with a man. I said she should just do it so she knew what it was. She called me up one night—she was in New York modeling, I was in Philly in school—and she called and said, ‘I did it!’ And I said, ‘Did what?’ And she said, ‘Well, I could’a done
that
with a German shepherd.’ Now that I look back, though, maybe that whole thing wasn’t true. Maybe she wanted me to see her as a certain kind of gay woman to set a standard for me.”

Rochelle got a job doing nails at Salon Samuel, the well-known coif shop in the Tropicana casino owned by the flamboyant Samuel Posner. Sam, as he was known by all, had made a professional reputation by doing over both celebrity clients and the truckloads of new cocktail waitresses pouring into the casinos. If there were ever any truly beautiful people in Atlantic City, they knew the charming, chatty hairdresser.

Gia was still doing some modeling, but mostly she worked for her father. “We settled into a routine,” Rochelle said. “Every morning at six o’clock, I’d feel somebody pokin’ me ‘C’mon, the clinic, the methadone,’ she’d say. It opened at six. She’d poke until I’d tell her to take my car and go, although she really wanted company. Then she’d come back and say, ‘McDonald’s.’ She’d go there and come back and wave Egg McMuffin in my face and then the methadone would kick in and she’d feel good. Then she wanted to have sex.

“Some mornings she liked to eat breakfast at the Cup and Saucer, this little diner. She always had creamed chipped beef on toast and she’d lean across the table and tell me she loved me. She was really open and aggressive. I’d be working and she would come and bring my lunch. One time my boss saw her and said, ‘Hey, that’s Gia!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, she’s my roommate.’

“She used to wait for me outside of work, call me up there fifteen times, any excuse she could get. If I was doing a guy’s nails, she’d come in and accuse me of getting a date with him. She was so possessive, overpowering—so jealous, it was amazing. She had a bad temper. I was in the car with this guy friend of mine and I wouldn’t roll the window down. I knew that one, ‘Roll the window down.’ She jumped
through
the windshield of my car feet first, right through it.

“Did I cheat on her? Once in a while. Once in a while, men, once in a while, women. But it was only when she did something that made me think it was over with her. I wouldn’t take it as cheating. I guess I only did that stuff to piss her off.”

Their fights became legendary among their small circle of friends. Gia’s father never claimed to really understand the relationship, but grew to accept it and to expect the periodic battles.

“Rochelle came into the store one day,” recalled Dan Carangi, “and she said, ‘Look what Gia did to me!’ She said Gia beat her up. I guess they had a little lover’s quarrel. I said, ‘Look, Rochelle, nobody said you had to live with her.’”

“When I heard them back there crackin’ heads, I didn’t get involved,” explained Michael Carangi. “It’s like two cats.
You’re gonna get hurt if you pull a girl off another girl. Y’know, women are just different. There’s, like, a girl I used to go out with, and she used to feel that if she was with a girl she wasn’t cheatin’ on me, y’know? I said, ‘Well, if you’re sleeping with her, what’s the difference if it’s a guy or not?’ But women have their own way of thinking.”

Gia’s modeling career finally came to an end that fall while she was living in Atlantic City. “I remember one time the people from that Elite place were calling at Hoagie City,” recalled Dan Carangi. “Gia was supposed to be on a plane for Germany and they called and talked to my brother. Said Gia never showed up. The woman said, ‘We love Gia and we want to give her all the chances we can, see if you can get in touch with her.’ Another time Gia told me she was supposed to be making some lipstick ads that were never finished because they dropped her when they found out about the drug addiction. She’d get herself all together, look really great, get ready to work again, and then something would always happen.” During one of her last trips to Germany, she had been stopped at the airport at Hamburg and searched by local authorities, who found works in her luggage and threatened to send her home.

Finally, Elite used a behind-the-scenes pact between the agencies as an excuse to freeze Gia from working. The International Model Management Association—which existed mostly for the regional modeling agencies to communicate and had no power over New York agencies whatsoever—made an agreement about drug use. “They said that if somebody had a drug problem nobody would represent them,” recalled Jo Zagami. “At that point I froze Gia and said you can come back when you can.” Elite’s decision seemed justifiable, but at the same time, somewhat hypocritical in its lateness. There was nothing very humanitarian about representing an admitted junkie for over a year and then cutting her off for her own good after her earning power had sunk below acceptable levels. But it was, after all, as it always had been, just business.

One of her last jobs was a fur and leather supplement for German
Vogue,
shot by Albert Watson. Fashion editor Suzanne Kolmel came to New York to do the sittings. One of
the shots was a singularly sad close-up of Gia’s face, swathed in fur, the camera flash reflected perfectly in her weary eyes. But a cover try was less successful. “Albert booked her again to help her and to give her another cover,” Kolmel recalled. “But, she was completely in heroin … she was
shivering,
she couldn’t stop. She was so pathetic. And here, she had been the
biggest
girl.”

Several months after Gia moved to Atlantic City, Kathleen came to visit. It was the first time mother and daughter had seen each other in over six months, probably the longest they had ever been apart in their lives. “She was kind of huffy with me, still upset that I hadn’t let her move back in,” Kathleen recalled. “And I said, ‘Don’t you understand that I
had to say no?’ “

“Maybe you should’ve done it before,” Gia said. “This is the first time you ever said no to me.”

Kathleen hoped that the conversation would prove to be cathartic—that it could be a first step toward Gia turning her life around, and perhaps even returning to her life’s work in modeling. But the conversation did little to change the situation.

“Parents can do so much more if they really want to, if they don’t ignore situations,” said Gia’s aunt Nancy Adams, who, at the time, was living in Philadelphia and still watching the situation from afar herself. “Kathleen just ignored this, she could’ve been more of a help. Rochelle struggled with it. If Gia came to me and asked me for money for drugs, I would give it to her—because I knew what the alternative was. The problem was really too big for everyone. But the denial of this problem on Kathleen’s part was just unbelievable.

“It was just part of the way she had always dealt with Gia. I remember at one point, Gia was maybe nineteen and Kathy was telling my sister Barbara and me how undeveloped Gia was and that she was still a virgin. And my sister dropped a plate. She looked at me and just mouthed, ‘She’s lost her mind.’ Gia would
never
tell her mother the truth, that’s true, but her mother dealt with her on such a crazy level. Rochelle and I, and a lot of people, tried to help her, but she wanted her mother. This poor girl, she had so much
to deal with, and it always came down to ‘Why did my mother leave me when I was eleven?’ I never had an answer for this. What can you say? What is the answer? I’m not saying my sister is responsible, but … it was
Rochelle
over the years who was keeping Gia out of alleys and trash cans and all the other things that could’ve happened.”

It was never exactly clear what kinds of things did happen to Gia when her desperation for drugs overcame her street smarts. The stories always came out later, in bits and pieces. “I know one time she was raped by a black guy in Atlantic City,” recalled Rochelle. “She had gone to get Valiums in one of the ghetto neighborhoods because the methadone wasn’t holding her. She said she went to this guy’s apartment and he locked the door, threw her down and raped her. And then he kept coming into Hoagie City when she was working and bothering her.

“Besides that, I don’t think she ever turned tricks for drugs. I know she promised people sex and
tricked
them. She would give them, like, an apartment key and tell them, ‘Okay, go to my apartment,’ and not be there. I do remember one time I came home from work and she was there with this guy—she told this guy that she was going to do him, or whatever, and he gave her the drugs and she was all high. So when I came home it was like, ‘Get the fuck out,’ and the guy left, like he was afraid.

“But sex was very special to her. She’d knock somebody on their head and take their wallet before she’d do that. She’d go into somebody’s apartment and wait ’til they were asleep and steal their stuff.

“Although, well, she did tell me she was embarrassed about a lot of things that she had done. She never said what they were, you know. I guess they could have been sexual. And maybe she didn’t tell me because she knows how I think about things. I would never, I mean there is no way I would have sex for drugs. Gia knew me well enough to know that I would think that was scummy and low.”

In March of 1984, Patty Stewart was looking for subjects for an assignment from her photography class at the Philadelphia College for the Arts. A compact, dark-haired twenty-two-year-old who had become friendly with Toni O’Connor and some
of the other girls at the DCA after Gia left town, Stewart mostly knew about the supermannequin from Philadelphia by legend. She had met Gia only once, at a huge, outdoor concert by the Police and the Go-Go’s at Liberty Bell Racetrack in the Northeast, but the meeting had made quite an impression. Years later she could still describe in detail the mystical drugged glow of Gia’s face behind mirrored sunglasses, and her leather pants with a
V
ripped into the backside, revealing underpants that said Dior all over them

Patty and Gia had a mutual friend Vicky,* who worked in her parents’ flower shop in South Philadelphia but often visited Atlantic City, where her family had a home. She was an ex-lover of Patty’s, and an enamored friend of Gia’s who had loaned the model money about five times too often. When Patty let it be known that she needed test subjects, Vicky suggested that Gia might do the budding photographer a favor. A tentative meeting was set up, but then Vicky had a little too much to drink the night of the rendezvous and wasn’t able to act as intermediary. Gia arranged to meet Patty at the Saratoga herself.

“She was straight that night, wasn’t high or anything, and she looked great,” Patty recalled. “We talked, I told her about my thesis. She had been nervous around me initially but she got more comfortable. It was getting late, and she made a pass at me—we were sitting there kissing. Now, I’m not very forward to begin with: she made the pass. I went to call Vicky, and she didn’t answer the phone. We walked over to Vicky’s parents’ house, where I was supposed to stay, and she didn’t answer the door. So Gia invited me to stay at her place, above the hoagie shop. We just stayed up all night and ended up spending, like, four or five days with each other. We never took the pictures, but other things happened. She started spilling her guts to me.

“She told me a little bit about Rochelle—she said they were just friends, which I knew was a lie. She talked a lot about Sandy. She said people sort of knew she and Sandy were an item and would book them together to see what went on—but that they would act real professional. She said Sandy was the last girl that she really loved, and that I reminded her of Sandy. We got pretty intimate. She started filling my head with all kinds of ideas. ‘You’re such a nice girl and you’re into
photography … after you graduate, move down here with me … when I get better, I’m going back to New York …’ She wanted to get a video camera and open a little studio to take videos of people: it was starting to be popular then for actresses to have a video portfolio.

“She was telling me all this stuff. I started falling for her. I told her I hadn’t gone out with anyone for a while. When you’re a lesbian in Philadelphia and don’t fit the stereotypical image, it’s not easy. Gia was butch in a fashionable way. When she went out, she wore cowboy boots and dungarees instead of Reeboks and khaki pants. With lesbians, ninety percent of them have sneakers on, white sneakers, and little Lacoste shirts. It’s rare you meet someone who’s feminine and who doesn’t fit the image.

“She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe how nice you are.’ She thought I was very naive about the drug scene, about the addict thing, about how hard it can be to break away from it. A lot of times she’d tell me something and I’d say ‘What?’ She wanted me to be her guardian angel, because she knew I wasn’t part of that world.”

As part of their whirlwind romance, Patty was treated to an abridged oral history of what had happened to Gia in New York. “She talked about modeling,” Patty recalled. “She said that, when they were on the islands, all the models referred to her as ‘Sister Morphine.’ They would all come to her and say, ‘Gia, find us drugs,’ because she could find drugs
anywhere.
She told me about Janice Dickinson. She said one time they were on a shoot, Janice Dickinson was missing her boyfriend and said, ‘Come over here, Gia.’ Gia said, ‘I wasn’t gonna be her fling.’