Thing of Beauty (58 page)

Rob Fay
was
allowed to visit, although he was “walkin’ on eggshells all the time to make sure I could get in there,” he recalled. “Rochelle wanted to see Gia. I talked to Gia about it, and she wanted to see Rochelle, but she knew the mother wouldn’t let her. I tried to hook the two of them up on the phone, but it didn’t work out. Kathleen blamed a lot of Gia’s life on Rochelle, which was bullshit. I think part of the reason she took the drugs was to show her mom that
she
wasn’t in control, as much as she would like to think that she was. But, whatever Gia did, she did to herself. Nobody made her do anything, she knew that. There’s nobody to blame in this whole thing but Gia. She shot the dope, let’s be real.

“When I first went to see Gia, they made me put on this gown, y’know, nine hundred gloves and all this head shit and everything. I was, like, devastated, I had never seen anything like that. And when I came out, the nurse who helped to undress me with all this stuff, she could see that I was crying. Kathy came up to me and she was like real vague about everything. She was not saying, like, Gia will be all right, but she was real vague about the AIDS. That was the only time they had me put on the gloves and all that. After that I just walked in.

“They still told me not to touch her, y’know, but that was bullshit. And when Gia was awake, we were like old buddies. We used to sit and watch TV all cuddled up together, and there was no problem.”

Although some of Gia’s relatives and friends would never forgive Kathleen for her behavior during the hospitalization, several of Gia’s counselors felt they understood exactly what was going on. “My perception of what happened at the
end,” said one counselor, “was that Gia wanted this type of nurturing from her mom and she set it up so that she got it before she died. I know some people thought it might not have been a good idea. But you have to understand that this was this woman’s
daughter
and they had been fighting for position most of Gia’s life. Any woman you talk to who has lost a child—that’s the hardest thing, the hardest grief to get over. I think Gia felt that her mother was finally there for her. Everybody prepares to die. That might have been Gia’s way.

“I believe that people are basically good. And I believe that every parent really loves their kid. They might just not know how to do it in a way that
helps
their kid. This is what I think Gia came to feel at the end, that her mom did love her but just didn’t know quite how to do it in a way that Gia needed it.”

Some recognized the same phenomenon, but interpreted it less charitably. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Nancy Adams recalled. “Gia always wanted her mother’s attention. And now she finally had it—and she paid for it with her life.”

For a week or so, it was unclear how sick Gia was. She was given blood and medication, her brothers convinced her to eat, and on some days she looked healthier than she had in months. She was well enough one day to insist that her mother give her the cash she had left in her wallet. “She really had this trip about money,” Kathleen recalled. “I had taken her wallet out of her pocketbook because I didn’t think it was safe to leave it there in the hospital room. I had just washed my hands and gone through this whole sterile procedure when she demanded the money. I said, ‘What are you going to do with this?’ They were hooking her up again to a drug she didn’t like. It made her sick. Maybe she thought she’d be able to bribe somebody to get her out of the hospital.”

One afternoon, Kathleen left the hospital for dinner and came back in the evening. When she did, Gia was having trouble breathing, and the doctors were debating whether to put her on a respirator. Kathleen went into the room, and thought she noticed a red spot on the bedsheets under Gia’s hand. She pulled back the sheets to reveal her daughter
lying in a pool of blood, and immediately ran out into the hall screaming for a doctor, a nurse, anyone. Help came, but the gloves everyone was wearing were soon so covered with AIDS-infected blood that “we knew we were in trouble,” Kathleen recalled. “I finally told the nurse to go sterilize her hands.”

When Gia was out of immediate danger, a new debate began over code status. Kathleen had changed her mind. She now insisted that her daughter
should
be put on life support, and pushed Gia to sign new consent forms.

“They brought the paper and I said, ‘Gia, just sign it,’” Kathleen recalled, “and she said, ‘Thank you very much for making my decision for me.’ She had to make such a big deal out of everything … reading it, whether she understands it or not. I just said ‘Sign it.’ I was a nervous wreck.” Gia finally signed the forms, and she was moved to another room to be put on oxygen.

“As they were moving her, a doctor came out and said to me, ‘What do you think you’ve saved her for?’” Kathleen recalled. “She said, ‘If you were out in California, you wouldn’t be putting her through this. You’d sign a paper when you went into the hospital so you wouldn’t go through this.’ I thought, ‘How cruel can you be, to say this to me?’ Yet that’s what she thought we should have done.

“Every doctor said there was some hope she could come off the respirator. But then everything went wrong that could go wrong. Enlarged liver, enlarged spleen, her kidneys went. They punctured her lung, which had to be drained all the time. I’d leave and everything would be fine, and I’d come back and would be hit with another bombshell. At the end, she was spared absolutely nothing. Every organ in that girl’s body failed.

“Then I had to fight because they decided that she wanted to die. She didn’t want to die, she just wanted to get the hell off the respirator. She wanted to go to Disneyland; she thought she could still beat it. She would write me notes, ‘We can buy oxygen, we can get a tank at home, take me home, take me home!’ And I would explain almost every time I walked in there, ‘Gia, if I could get you to the elevator, I would take you home. But you’d be dead before we got to the door.’”

The hospital staff even tried to convince Kathleen to have someone else appointed Gia’s guardian. “The psychiatric nurse misinterpreted something Gia said,” Kathleen recalled, “and I thought I was going to have to go and have somebody appointed her guardian. I said,
‘I’m
the next of kin. She can’t speak for herself. I have to be the one. I talk for her.’ The doctor agreed with me. They wanted me to sign the paper so that if she had cardiac arrest they would not do the heroics. I wouldn’t do it. Because, if I did that, they would cut back on treatment.”

Gia was kept on a respirator for nearly a month. Her room was decorated with flowers. Kathleen was surprised the hospital would allow flowers in such a sterile environment, but when she found out she filled the room with Gia’s favorite yellow roses. There were also a few toys: a stuffed monkey, with Gia’s money pinned to it, and a yellow butterfly toy Rob Fay had hung from the IV holder above her.

Dawn Phillips managed to sneak in to see Gia one more time, and found her restrained in her bed so she wouldn’t keep pulling out the tubes in her body. The nurse undid the restraint when a visitor came, and Gia took Dawn by the shoulder and tried to pull her close.

“She was pulling my face towards her and trying to say something,” Dawn recalled, “but with the tube in her mouth, she couldn’t. No one else was in the room, and I began to get frightened. I didn’t know what she wanted, and she couldn’t tell me. I didn’t want to react to being so close to her … yet, there was fresh blood and saliva coming from her mouth. This made me nervous. I was pulled almost to her face when a nurse came in. Then I backed up. The whole time I was fighting my tears. When I go to the waiting room, I walked by Gia’s mom and Rob, who were there speaking … I just began to cry. When I went over to talk to them, Kathy was saying we weren’t supposed to be there. I said, ‘Don’t you think Gia needs to know she has friends who care about and love her, too?’ Kathy began saying something about Gia’s appearance … I went back in to see Gia. That was the last time I ever saw her.”

Rob got to see Gia one more time after that. Before he left, she handed him a note that said “I hope.”

A few of the nurses gave Gia lots of extra care. “There was one girl who would take care of her like a young child,” Kathleen recalled. “She got to know Gia the way I knew Gia. She would comb Gia’s hair, get her all fixed up. I took in ribbons. Gia didn’t like ribbons, and she would take the ribbons out. Then they would tie her hair up with a piece of hospital string, and she was satisfied with that.” One day Kathleen looked at Gia’s legs and decided they didn’t look right, so she found a basin and washed her daughter’s feet. But at other times, Gia didn’t want her mother to look at her atrophying extremities. “Her nightgown would get pulled up and she didn’t want me to see her,” she recalled. “Gia would force the nightgown down, and it was amazing that someone on a respirator would still have that pride.”

The last holiday she and her mother were able to celebrate together was Halloween. “She had pumpkins in the room,” Kathleen said, beginning to cry. “I went out at lunchtime and brought her a great big scary hand and some little cat. And I laid the cat on her head and put the scary hand on her. When Dr. Oaks came in, I said, ‘You have to show Dr. Oaks your Halloween outfit.’ And she reached over with the hand and pretended like she was scary. He couldn’t
believe
that we celebrated Halloween.”

The last week nobody was allowed to visit but Kathleen. Rob Fay, among others, was livid. But Gia was on life support, rarely conscious. And her physical deterioration had been so extreme that Kathleen was sure she wouldn’t want anyone to see her like that.

“She died around ten in the morning,” Kathleen recalled. “I saw them wash her and the flesh fell off her back. I had my Bible with me. Usually, when Gia went anyplace she took her Bible with her, but she made me leave hers at home so it wouldn’t get messed up or lost or something. I hadn’t read it all day. I had just left her father in the waiting room. I was reading her the Twenty-third Psalm, the Lord is my shepherd. I had read it through once and I started again and I got to ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Death.’ And I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and the nurse that was on duty was running out of the room and the machines were going haywire.

“I ran to her and sobbed, ‘Oh, my baby, my baby,’ and she was gone. They took all the hoses out of her. It was over. We went home. Luckily, the first undertaker we went to had no objections to preparing an AIDS patient. He just encouraged us to keep it a little quieter than we wanted to, suggested we not do an obituary in New York. He said we should have a closed casket, because he didn’t know how she would look. But I did have to pick out what she would wear anyway.

“Anytime I ever picked out anything for her, I was never sure if she would like it. Because even if I was positive in my mind, it would always turn out that she wouldn’t like it. He suggested a dressing gown and nice lounging pajamas, to make sure it was big and roomy. I wanted some member of the family to see the body, but he wouldn’t allow it.

“Her father walked in and saw it was a closed casket and had a fit But Gia and I had a pact that if she wasn’t going to look her absolute best, it should be a closed casket. She didn’t want people looking at her if she didn’t look good.”

T
he memorial service for Way Bandy was held at the Japan House in Manhattan on Thursday, November 13, five days before Gia’s death. It was attended by more than two hundred people—all the
fashionistas,
and all the people Bandy had made beautiful. Besides the eulogizing, the event was also used as a fund-raiser for New York Hospital’s Laboratory for AIDS Research. An envelope for contributions was slipped into each program.

The service was extensively covered in the media. And the following March, when
Vanity Fair
did a feature on the decimation of talent in fashion and the arts from AIDS, a description of the service was used as the opening scene. As part of the article, photographs of fifty AIDS victims were offered in memoriam. Among them were Bandy,
Interview
editors Robert Hayes and Peter Lester, model Joe Macdonald,
GQ
editor Jack Haber and
New York
magazine writer Henry Post. Only two of those memorialized were women, record producer Lyn Hilton and Esme Hammond, a friend of the New York music scene and the wife of legendary record producer John Hammond.

Gia Carangi’s funeral was held on November 23 at a small funeral home in suburban Philadelphia. Kathleen and Henry Sperr did their best to contact the people in Philadelphia and New York who they thought should know. Some of Gia’s Philadelphia friends chose not to attend because of their anger at Kathleen—either because she hadn’t let them in to see Gia or she hadn’t told them when they called
that Gia was terminally ill. Nobody from the fashion world attended the funeral or sent flowers, although several weeks later, a Mass card arrived from Francesco Scavullo, who later recalled, “We were hysterical crying in the studio when we heard.”

At the time of Gia’s death, no obituaries ever appeared in major newspapers, magazines or trade publications. Only a small death notice appeared in
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
She would never be mentioned in any of the myriad articles about AIDS in the fashion industry.

“You know, this will sound awful,” recalled one hairstylist, “but I remember when her father called me and said she died, I wondered why he called me. He said, ‘I know you were very good friends with my daughter.’ It would have been awful for me to deny it, wouldn’t it?”

“I remember asking a photographer, ‘Where is this Gia, whatever happened with her?’” recalled German
Vogue
fashion editor Suzanne Kolmel. “He said, ‘You know that she
died.
And at the end, she sold
pizza.’ “

“About three months after Gia died, I was working with Sandy Linter for
Harper’s Bazaar,”
recalled one top model. “And, somehow or another, Gia’s name came up, which
never
should have happened anyway, but it did. Sandy was doing my makeup, and about halfway through she said, ‘Excuse me,’ and she left and walked around the block for about twenty-five minutes.”