Thing of Beauty (53 page)

Although she acted dopey and slow at times, glimpses of the old, mischievous Gia were beginning to emerge.

“When Gia was around, we always had some running joke,” recalled Sammartino. “I remember there was this ad on TV—’Gee, your hair smells good.’ Every time we saw her, we’d say, ‘Gia, your hair smells good,’ and she’d finally stop waiting on the customer and start talking to us.

“Every now and then we would talk about drugs. We were all fairly young and we were interested, like, what did
you do that made you have to go to Eagleville? She would tell about how she did all these drugs, that she’d shoot up. Everything you could imagine to take, she would take. She said that’s why she was blackballed from modeling. She said she had been a model. She said she used to be rich. I can’t remember if I believed her or not. She said she was a model. She never said she was a big famous model. We figured, oh, like some rinky-dink place. When she first said it, she said, ‘Oh yeah, you’d be surprised. I’ve gained a little weight, but I used to be like this and really beautiful.’ Her hair was really short, and she said she looked better with makeup, but she didn’t like doing that, it wasn’t
her.
The other girls in the store would say, ‘She is pretty, very
plain
but pretty.’ She said she would bring in the pictures but she never did.”

R
ob Fay went into the last phase of the Candidates Program several weeks after Gia did. They would meet up at the nightly meeting at St. Paul’s church in Norristown—an “open” meeting that encouraged newcomers and, like Eagleville itself, tended to put all addicted people together rather than separating by substances.

Sometimes they hung out together during the day. “It seemed like she was really enjoying sobriety,” Fay recalled. “We would go places and that girl taught me how to enjoy
everything.
I mean, a bee coming at you, she would enjoy it. She had this sense of how important things are: snowin’ out, rainin’ out, leaves, stuff like that. The sound of traffic. Things like that, things I was just beginning to notice because I could see and hear again. I just thought, wow, this girl’s pretty cool to hang with. Look at the shit she’s teaching me, stuff that I should’ve learned when I was a kid. She was appreciating it again. It was a new beginning.

“Jesus, I never had that much fun before or since. She was just nuts. We went into a department store one time, and they got those little courtesy desks there with the manager standing behind. I’m just walking in, and she says, ‘Keep your hands in your pockets, I’m not bailing you out again for shoplifting.’ So I played right into it, I said, ‘I’ll
be in the ladies’ lingerie department,’ and then we would just bust out laughing.

“We talked about making movies together. We’d see something in real life, like an old couple driving with the wife sittin’ real close to the husband—I mean, like, seventy years old or something. That kinda stuff really hit her. She said, ‘I could really use that, that would be nice on film.’

“We were having an amazing time. They have a saying in the recovery program: ‘Beyond your wildest dreams.’ That’s really what it was.”

When Gia spoke about the future, she seemed most interested in children. She didn’t talk about getting married and being a mother so much as she dreamed about having children around.

“She
loved
kids,” Fay said. “She’d see kids in the malls and she’d go over to them. She didn’t give a shit what the parents thought. Kids would come over to her, too. This cute adorable kid comes walking right over to Gia—the mother’s saying, ‘She’s never done this before with anyone.’

“She wanted to have a kid. Kids could make her laugh. Little kids in the neighborhood would be yellin’ and screamin’ and you or I would say,
‘Goddamn
I wish them kids would shut up.’ She’d say, ‘Listen to that, let’s go out and talk to those kids.’ And she would. She used to talk about how they got all their life ahead of them …”

Easing patients out of the Eagleville nest was one of the most harrowing parts of the rehab process. No matter how long a patient had been sober and working hard in therapy, a huge percentage returned to substance abuse in a very short amount of time—sometimes the same
day
they left. The patients who went on to get their lives together and keep their addictive behavior checked were often the ones who went out on a bender just after release and scared themselves. They either scared themselves to death, or scared themselves straight. The difference was often the purity of the drugs or pure luck.

“I remember when they threw me out of the outpatient part of the program,” said Rob Fay, “as I was leaving, they said, ‘You’ll be high in a week, and dead in a month.’ I remember those guys standing in a circle telling me that.
Today, two of them are alive. One is sober, but he’s only been sober for four weeks. Four of them are dead. Two killed themselves, and two others were drug-related situations.”

The fear of returning to the life of an addict hovered over every decision. The rarely subtle advice of the counselors—who Gia saw during the day as a client, and in the evening at meetings as a peer in sobriety—was meant to reverberate in the brain at moments of weakness. One of the things Gia’s therapists had agreed upon was that she should not move back in with her mother. But what they didn’t tell her was how difficult it would be to live in Norristown, with recovering people, users and dealers everywhere, and the Eagleville gossip network crowded with stories of inpatient breakthroughs and outpatient tragedies.

Inside Eagleville, everyone was pushing for you to get better. Outside, many people seemed to be taking bets on when you would fall off the wagon. The people who were your best friends inside—because they had nothing else to do but support you—now had better things to do with their time. Norristown was comforting because you could see just how many other people were in your same predicament, but it was frightening to see just how poorly some of those peers were faring.

In November of 1985, against the wishes of her counselors and friends, Gia moved back in with her mother in Richboro. “When she moved back to her mom’s, I told her she would start using again,” recalled Rob Fay. “I told her it’s the worst thing you can do.”

“Hello Book,” Gia wrote in her journal, “It is now Nov. 16. I am at my Mom’s again and feeling fuck-up. You see a quite odd thing happen … I fell in love with my counselor and I think she just feels sorry for me I hate anyone to pity me it so degrading. Well, I won’t be talking to her, it’s hopeless and I must move on I’ve been stuck for to long. I have a girl Rochelle who loves me and I her I am just not ready for tieing up. Girls have always been a problem for me I really don’t know why I bother with them.”

Gia quit her job at the mall—one day she just didn’t show up for work, and was never heard from again—and tried to concentrate on moving forward. She contacted Elite and
Scavullo’s studio to let them know she was alive, out of rehab, drug-free and thinking about doing some modeling in the coming year. She even called Lizzette Kattan, who had married well in 1983, left
Bazaar
and the business to start a family, and was living in Milan.

The modeling business might very well have been happy to have Gia back, if she were ready to work and back in shape. Most of the models she broke in with had either disappeared or risen to the newly created status of “supermodel.” This was achieved by combining traditional fashion magazine and advertising work with
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue appearances and relationships with rock stars, athletes or other “real” celebrities. This path could lead to attention from newer media outlets with lowered, or at least
different
standards of celebrity.
USA Today
was the new national newspaper with an inexhaustible appetite for fame and near-fame. Music video now had its first twenty-four-hour cable network, MTV, and its first prime-time program,
Miami Vice.
And there were new daytime and late night talk shows where models were suddenly considered worth talking to.

Even with this new attention available, many of the top models didn’t seem that interested in modeling anymore. Kelly Emberg had all but given up her career to cohabit with singer Rod Stewart, Iman had followed husband Spencer Haywood to Italy when his NBA career ended, Patti Hansen had been in a few bad movies before marrying Keith Richards and becoming a full-time mom, Christie Brinkley was beginning her very public romance with Billy Joel, as was Carol Alt with hockey star Ron Greschner. Since 1980, Cheryl Tiegs had been designing women’s sportswear for Sears.

The cresting model of the moment was twenty-year-old Paulina Porizkova, who had been an Elite model since her mid-teens: her pictures began appearing in places like French
Elle
as early as 1980. Paulina had combined her years of print work in clothes and cosmetics, consecutive
SI
covers in 1984 and 1985, and an appearance in a music video for the Cars (whose lead singer, Rick Ocasek, became her boyfriend) into a formidable visual résumé. Then she began
making talk show appearances and proclaiming, in heavily accented English, that modeling was boring and she hated it but she was making a lot of money. The complaining only increased her celebrity status. It was impossible for even a top girl to convince a model-mad America that it was fascinated by a wonderful world of modeling that didn’t really exist.

Paulina was showing the same healthy disrespect for the industry that Gia had been famous for. The difference was that Paulina always showed up for her jobs. So her attitude did not prevent her from winning a contract with Estée Lauder.

As the modeling industry expanded—Elite had now copied Ford by sponsoring its own annual international competition with a guaranteed contract as first prize—it needed as many of its elder statesgirls in place as possible. The agencies needed Christie Brinkley to attract the next crop of girls who wanted to
be
Christie Brinkley. Even though modeling had been through many changes in the past five years, there were still only ten or fifteen girls since the mid-seventies who had ever made it to Gia’s level. It was what they
did
with that recognizable beauty after modeling that made a difference. Many of those who worked with her thought Gia would make the transition from supermodel to actress far better than most—because she had such a strong personality and was as stunning in motion as frozen on film. She certainly seemed as likely a prospect as another former Philadelphian, Veronica Hamel, who was finishing up a long successful run on
Hill Street Blues,
or Andie MacDowell, whose voice was dubbed over (by actress Glenn Close) in an attempt to save her appearance as Jane in the Tarzan movie
Greystoke.

Gia spoke with her lawyer, who had come to visit her at Eagleville, to try to get some of her legal matters taken care of. Besides modeling, she looked into a writing course at the community college and a photography course in Philadelphia. Just before Christmas, she even went to Atlantic City to see Rochelle. Both were working hard to be on their best behavior. “We were together for that Christmas,” recalled Rochelle, “and she wouldn’t even drink the egg
nog. She was completely straight. She said, ‘I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to die.’”

“Right after Christmas, Gia came into my room one night,” recalled Kathleen. “She said, ‘Mommy’—she was still calling me Mommy, even though they tried to get her to stop at Eagleville—’Mommy, look at my ear.’ I looked into her ear and it looked like big flakes. It looked like the stuff on her feet. All the time she was in rehab, she had some problem with her toes, like a rot. I mixed up a solution and flushed out her ear and the stuff that came out was unbelievable. Her skin was also bad. Her skin had always been very clear and translucent. She had never worn makeup before going to New York, and her skin had reacted badly to all the makeup then, but it had cleared up after she stopped modeling. But now she had what looked like teenage acne. She also started saying she just didn’t feel right.”

AIDS was just beginning to seep into the mass-market consciousness, after years of being whispered about. Actor Rock Hudson’s public admission during the previous summer that he had contracted the disease—and had traveled to France for treatments unavailable in America—was followed by his highly publicized death on October 2, 1985. The chain of events finally gave the general media an excuse to cover what was still being referred to as “the gay plague.”

In the fashion business, all eyes were on Perry Ellis, whose thirty-seven-year-old lover, Laugh lin Barker—also the president of Ellis’s company—was dying of AIDS. Ellis, so much the image of the robust American man that he was often the best model for his own clothes, was, himself, looking ill. Rumors began circulating after Ellis fell against Bill Blass in the receiving line at a December party at the Metropolitan Museum, and the incident was reported in
The New York Times.
When he appeared in January at the Council of Fashion Designers Awards—just after Barker’s death—the widely circulated paparazzi photographs told the story that no one in the industry dared to publicly utter. Ellis, too, was wasting away from AIDS.

The fashion industry had been quietly noting for a year or two that a lot of the young, partying kids they counted
upon for influxes of raw energy were disappearing with greater regularity. Nightlife burnout was common and drug use was taking its victims, but this was something else. These people were “going away” and never coming back. Fate had chosen Perry Ellis to be the fashion industry’s first poster child for the AIDS epidemic. He would deny the rumors. Rock Hudson’s death had done little to ease public acceptance of AIDS or homosexuality. And in the image-conscious fashion industry, homosexuality, once a hallmark of a higher fashion sense, was now associated with the plague. Makeup artists and hairdressers, who had once regaled models in the mornings with stories of sexual exploits, now found it prudent to announce their monogamy, or even celibacy. The rumor mills added “Did you hear who’s sick?” to the list of standard questions to be addressed, just as they had added “Did you hear who’s gone away?” when rehab visits began in the late seventies.