Thing of beauty, p.20
Thing of Beauty, page 20
“But then, I think the way I’ve always reacted to girls is that I never know what’s going on with them and I’m not really interested. It’s just, instinctively, whether it works or not. With her, at times she annoyed me, because she was late or she was falling asleep. But I never thought of it, because then, in the picture, even without my noticing it—something was there.”
Chatelain never wondered about the process of “something” turning up there until years later, when his confidence started to fade. “I guess a bigger part of it than I realized at the time was just getting swept up in the moment,” he said. “I can now see that if you give a person a chance, he’ll make good pictures. When I was with British Vogue, I got a chance to make good pictures. I had the best models, best hair, best makeup, best editors. You can’t miss. You have to be a total asshole to not succeed. I look at Patrick Demarchelier. I don’t think he’s a great photographer, but he’s very smart about his business and he does it well. He’s being given a chance, every day, to do good pictures. So he comes out with good pictures.”
The day after Gia returned from London was, as she marked in her datebook, “Mommy’s Birthday.” Even though she had too much work to visit Kathleen, she wanted to spoil her in the way of the fashion industry. She arranged to have flowers and champagne delivered to her.
Manhattan florists loved models and agency people, because they had made saying it with flowers their industry standard. It was not uncommon for models to send extravagant floral arrangements to their bookers, their agents or anyone they perceived as having done them a favor; nor was it uncommon for agents and photographers to send models flowers at their apartments, or even at a shooting. Almost everyone important in the business could be counted on to have some recently delivered flowers on his or her office desk or living room coffee table, and perhaps the remains of a not-so-recently-delivered arrangement as well.
Gia had always loved flowers, so she was happy to jump on the bud bandwagon. “Gia loved roses,” Kathleen recalled, “and when she became a model and had all this money to spend, she sent $50-a-dozen roses like it was nothing. She brought me an orchid one time she bought with Scavullo. Her color was yellow, my color was apricot. I still can’t see a yellow rose without thinking of her.”
While Gia was in London, Studio 54 was raided. The Organized Crime Strike Force of the U.S. Attorney’s office, seeking evidence to help them put down the disco-caine mutiny, recovered about an ounce of coke and a double set of books allegedly used to defraud the IRS. They also reportedly found a detailed list of the club’s celebrity customers, cross-referenced with the drugs and other party favors purchased to insure that they remained celebrity customers.
For some, the raid came as a sign that the party was waning, that Studio (which reopened the next day) would eventually go down, and the moment of the Beautiful People would pass just like any other fashion. For others, the raid simply signaled that the party had officially moved to a new location and a new host named Steve—Steve Mass, owner of the Mudd Club, which had opened the year before in lower Manhattan.
The Mudd Club was the latest in the progression of downtown hangouts that had begun in the mid-sixties with Max’s Kansas City. Max’s eventually begat CBGB’s, the Bowery bastion of New Wave and hardcore rock, where the Long Island band the Ramones got their start, only to see their fast, hard, gallows-funny tunes exported to England and imported back as punk rock in the form of the Sex Pistols. CBGB’s had been responsible for developing acts as disparate as Blondie and the Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Wendy O. Williams’ Plasmatics. These were the bands that were finally starting to reach mainstream public consciousness, collectively labeled the New Wave by enthused rock critics.
The New Wave caught on in other cities. Gia had seen some of these bands at The Hot Club in Philadelphia. It was there that she had first laid eyes on Blondie’s lead singer Deborah Harry, who was replacing David Bowie as her new idol. Blondie was the most commercial of the New Wave bands, and a perfect new favorite for Gia, whose taste in music ran from rock ‘n’ roll to really goony pop songs her friends in Philadelphia sometimes teased her about liking—songs like “I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes.” She wasn’t so much drawn to music on the cutting edge as she was good at finding the next hip thing that would be reaching the mass market. Blondie, which had been kicking around for three or four years, was next. Gia’s personal interest in the band grew after a guy Sharon knew in the record business arranged for them to see a Blondie show at the Tower and later meet the band at their Philadelphia hotel.
The Mudd Club cloned the sensibility of CBGB’s onto Studio 54’s disco with a touch of G. G. Knickerbockers—the Forty-fifth Street club where the entertainment in the main Barnum Room was transvestites flying through the air into nets above the dance floor. Club Mudd had bizarre stage shows, never-advertised live music (sometimes the fledgling U2, sometimes Shoxlumania, who dressed as Ukrainian folk dancers), and a record mix by DJ Anita Sarko that was relentlessly, even frighteningly, eclectic. Physically, the place was an even bigger dump than CBGB’s, but it was more of a scene piece than a fully functional rock bar. And it reveled in its decadence—the open drug use, the sexual posturing—in a way even Studio couldn’t match. Andy Warhol reportedly described the phenomenon of the Mudd Club by explaining: “In the sixties, we all had plenty to get pissed off about. Now we’re too tired and jaded for that, so we come here to get pissed on.”
The Mudd Club was much more Gia’s kind of place than Studio 54 had ever been. She could beautify any dance floor, but she thought of herself as a rock ‘n’ roll girl at heart. And the Mudd Club certainly had both a rock sensibility and an arty edge. Downtown New Wavers mingled there with aspiring artists and performers who would become Robert Mapplethorpe and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Eric Bogosian and Ann Magnuson and Madonna. The house heroes—occasionally in residence—were Keith Richards, Marianne Faithful, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and David Bowie, who was in town doing The Elephant Man on Broadway. All of this was still considered a little too dangerous for the Vogue world, but it was beginning to attract some uptown fascination—especially after the punk rock phenomenon produced its first front-page tragedy. On Friday October 13, Philadelphia-born Nancy Spungen was found murdered by her boyfriend, ex-Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, in their room at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street.
“Downtown” was still a very foreign place to the mainstream fashion world. “I remember Way Bandy had a period when he was really becoming part of the downtown scene,” recalled hairstylist Maury Hopson. “He was kind of just doing it for business. He had this uptown image, and it sort of made him a little hotter and more mysterious to be seen in these clubs downtown.
“Uptown is more upscale; downtown is more real, in its phony way. The pretensions are different, basically.”
The drugs were slightly different as well. Besides alcohol, which was never really dethroned as the universal intoxicant of choice, the uptown world tended to gravitate toward ups, the downtowners to a more mixed bag of ups and downs. The difference between the scenes was the difference between a snort of cocaine and the injected cocaine spiked with heroin known as a “speedball.”
Drug use had become so casual that the biggest shock of the Studio raid was probably the realization that cocaine was, technically, still illegal. Cocaine, amphetamines and Quaaludes were casually administered. Unless a substance was cooked down and smoked as freebase, or injected, it hardly even counted. Stimulants were often being taken for practical, work-related reasons. Just like athletes drank Gatorade (to wash down the speed and steroids), nightlifers used cocaine because it was the only way that people with real jobs during the day could stay out all night. Sexual athletes, especially gay men, added poppers to the menu: the amyl nitrite capsules, used medically to counteract angina attacks, were broken under the nose on the dance floor or during orgasm for the momentary rush. This was not drug experimentation—LSD had fallen from favor along with the whole idea of acid tests for mind expansion. This was medicine: better living through chemistry.
No matter how casual drug use had become, heroin remained the last taboo. Its use had not increased along with the dramatic rise in cocaine and other drugs—at least according to government statistics. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimated that in 1978, heroin addiction had reached its lowest point in years.
But heroin use was on the rise in Europe. The worsening problem in West Germany had been humanized recently by the magazine Stern, which published candid interviews with a fifteen-year-old heroin addict, prostitute and “girl of the streets” referred to as “Christiane F.” Her descriptions of Berlin in the mid-seventies, which later spawned a book and a film, didn’t sound all that much different from what was beginning to happen in New York.
Gia had never really cared for the modeling business from the very beginning, and her overnight success hadn’t changed her feeling that this was not the kind of world she would ever love. The money was suddenly pretty good and would only get better, the champagne and drugs were always the best available, and the parties were extravagant beyond belief. But the work itself, the way she spent most of her long, tiring days, was generally not very interesting to her. Modeling made her back and her brain sore. It required intense concentration on not concentrating on anything but moving and then not moving. People were always reaching out and touching her, but she wasn’t supposed to touch back. People were crowding in around her, fussing over her: painting her like a Seurat so that every tiny point of color was perfect and then lighting her up like a highway billboard. She was getting really sick of it. She wanted them to stop touching her.
Certain photographers, like Chris von Wangenheim, made her feel like she was acting rather than just standing there looking pretty (or dancing around to make the camera think she was having a good time). And she was getting a lot of mileage out of treating the whole fashion photography world like it was a big joke. For some photographers, her disdain looked and sounded a lot like that attitude thing that was all the rage downtown. Her lateness, lack of proper respect and other unheard-of unprofessionalism was actually working to her advantage. The photographers were just like the guys who had been coming on to her since she was a kid, their numbers geometrically increasing since her pictures started appearing in the magazines: when she told them to kiss off, they just loved her more. It was an amusing little mind-game to play, but there wasn’t much to be won by winning.
Still, there was the money. There weren’t a lot of other legal ways for an eighteen-year-old girl to make a hundred thousand dollars a year—which it appeared she could easily make in 1979. And there were the all-expenses-paid trips. And even though she had long ago grown tired of the masses of men and women who showered her with compliments about her beauty, there were a handful of people whose approval very much mattered to her. There were her surrogate mothers in the business, Willie and Lizzette, who were very pleased with her progress. And then there was her real mother down in Bucks County at the receiving end of all those women’s magazine subscriptions. Kathleen was bursting with a kind of pride that Gia had never seen before.
“Gia would tell you all the stuff that most women want to know about the models,” Kathleen recalled. “Which one had hips that went on forever. Which one had the pimples. Which one did Quaaludes to get the starry looks in her eyes. Which one was a real dog. Which one was a superbitch. Which one ran around saying ‘Take my picture, take my picture,’ and was just so into the whole thing.
“In the beginning, we were both sort of star-struck. She went on the most fantastic trips. She always called from where she was. She met an Italian prince in Capri. He loved her, he wanted a photo of her. Finally she just ripped a picture out of a magazine and wrote on it, ‘Eat your heart out, Gia.’ Jack Nicholson tried to get her to meet him in his room. I was in New York that week. I was making slipcovers for her sofa and she came back from this party and said, ‘Can you believe it, I just turned down Jack Nicholson?’ I said, “Thank god you did that, you don’t want to be involved with him.’
“She was in Vogue almost immediately—they loved her. She was always hard to get up in the morning, so they sent a limo for her. Whatever demand she made, she could. She wouldn’t work with certain people. And the more of a star she got to be, the more demanding she got to be.”
Many of her demands could only be fulfilled by Kathleen. The same young woman who was self-sufficient enough to live on her own as a high school student was suddenly calling on her mother, from New York, for every little thing. Gia was likely to make more money in the coming year than either her father or stepfather. But she wasn’t going to miss the chance to finally have Kathleen at her beck and call.
“Gia would announce, ‘I want you in New York,’ and she wanted me there at her disposal, to cook for her, whatever,” Kathleen recalled. “She couldn’t understand that I had a life with Henry. If she had had her way I would have been up there all the time. There were weeks when I would stay the whole week, never longer than two weeks. When she came home for the weekend I would go up there and get her. She knew she could get me to do anything she wanted. She was always demanding of my time. I didn’t do anything for her that I didn’t really want to do. I did it. I could’ve said no. But she was hard to say no to. I would have done it for any of my kids.”
To some of those close to Gia, the attention seemed like more than just a normal mother reveling in her daughter’s success. “Kathleen was driving up there to do Gia’s laundry,” recalled Nancy Adams. “When Gia and her brothers were kids, their mother wouldn’t do anything for them. They had to get up themselves, they had to do their own clothes. Now Gia’s a model, and she’s driving to New York to do her laundry for her.”
More often, though, Gia would save up her laundry to bring home. And even that was somehow exciting to Kathleen. “She must have had two washerloads of white socks,” she recalled. “When you have that kind of money, when things are dirty, you just buy more. She would just buy stuff and leave it wherever she was.”
Suddenly, instead of frustration, Gia was bringing fun and excitement to her mother’s life. “Gia was good to me,” Kathleen said. “She was very thoughtful and took care of me. I remember one time we were driving to New York together in my ‘78 Corvette. We came up the Holland Tunnel and saw this cab go flying past. As we got to an intersection, he hit the curb and then he leaped in the air and dropped out of the sky onto the top of the ‘78 Corvette. Gia got out and started screaming at this cab driver. And the police are there, and she’s got this knife in her hand and she’s gonna knife this guy. And these New York cops are standing there watching this saying, ‘If she does knife him, we’ll never see it.’ She was on her way to a big party at Studio 54, but she handled the whole situation. She gave me money—she said, ‘Make sure you don’t let them know you have the money’—and she wanted to send me home in a limousine. She looked out for Mommy that night.
“She was, really, the whole world to me. When she was home, the whole house would fill up. When she left it was empty. She had a certain way of coming through the door, like the Fourth of July and all fireworks were going off.”
It was all so exciting for Kathleen that she was able to put aside any nagging doubts she had that Gia couldn’t handle what was happening.
“In some ways, I realized the pressure she was under … I knew about the business from when I was in retailing. Even then you had to be a very particular type of person to be able to handle modeling. It’s an ego trip, a lot of jealousies and backstabbing and petty stuff. It takes a certain amount of strength, and because it’s such a glamorous business, everybody thinks they’re better-looking than everybody else.
“I knew how beautiful she was and how fragile she was. And I had this vision of her becoming this Marilyn Monroe type and becoming a sex symbol and dying a very tragic death young.”
9
This Year’s Girl
The new year brought Gia’s first magazine cover, the January 1979 issue of Italian Cosmo. When issues finally reached the few Manhattan newsstands that carried European magazines, Kathleen bought every copy she could find. The January issue of American Vogue included, besides six editorial shots of her, Gia’s first major advertisement: a Chris von Wangenheim shot for Gianni Versace.
Over the next months, as Gia marked her first anniversary in the business, the quality and quantity of her work skyrocketed. She went to Paris to do a sitting with Helmut Newton for French Vogue. Newton was nearing sixty, and he had been taking fashion photographs for various Vogues since the 1950s. He was raised in Berlin, but had moved to Australia during World War II and broke in at the Vogue edition there, eventually relocating to Paris, where he worked for all the major magazines. In the early seventies, he suffered a massive heart attack. When he recovered, his work became much more erotic, bizarre, powerful and self-consciously German. By photographing celebrities and fashion as if they were all beautified scenes from the cabarets of prewar Berlin and the lurid sex clubs on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, he had become modern just as his contemporaries were making their final slide into classicism.
Chris von Wangenheim, over twenty years his junior, was friendly with Newton. Those who appreciated the work of both photographers, and recognized the differences in their approaches and results, usually referred to Von Wangenheim as Newton’s protégé. Von Wangenheim’s detractors referred to him as the “budget Helmut Newton,” since they sometimes mined similar visual veins and Von Wangenheim was considerably less expensive.
