Thing of beauty, p.8
Thing of Beauty, page 8
The sensational case was the subject of several front page newspaper stories. But one of the unreported highlights of the proceedings—or so the story circulated through the Center City club world—was that Gia dramatically kissed the defendant one day as he was being led into the courtroom. During the kiss, it was said, she passed Timmy a Quaalude she had popped into her mouth.
To some of Gia’s friends, the Timmy Mills saga was a billboard-sized omen. “I stayed away from Gia for a while after that whole thing,” recalled Ronnie Johnson. “It was starting to get a little scary.”
But nothing seemed to scare Gia. She was fearless the way only pretty girls can be when they realize they can get away with anything, even if they get caught. And she was dauntless the way only Quaaluded teens can be: so oblivious that they can trip down a flight of concrete steps—like the ones leading to the good seats at the Spectrum—only to get up and walk away like nothing ever happened. It wasn’t that Gia walked through minefields and miraculously missed every mine. The occasional explosion just didn’t seem to phase her.
One of Gia’s favorite ways of daring life was to shoplift. Although she had never actually been arrested, Gia was well-known to the security departments at most of Center City’s better department stores and boutiques. Friends had noticed that her wardrobe seemed to be expanding. She began to mix inexpensive vintage clothes and army surplus with pricey pieces by Ralph Lauren and other top designers: never dresses or skirts, but blouses, sweaters, trousers and blazers. Few of these designer pieces had been paid for.
“She always ripped off good stuff,” recalled Nancy Adams. “Gucci, Halston … it wasn’t like she was going to the five and dime and ripping off lip gloss. She got briefcases, bathing suits, whatever she needed she got. She knew what she liked, she had expensive tastes and she couldn’t afford to buy these things herself. She was spoiled, but how many $500 sweaters does your father buy for you when you’re a teenager?”
Gia was amazed, she told friends, at how easy it was to take stuff from stores. It was incredible what you could get away with if you didn’t look the type. “Gia and I actually once went into Nan Duskin,” recalled Roseanne Rubino, “and we had army pants on, those balloon-leg army pants. We went into the dressing room, took a zillion things in, and we were very gracious. We ended up tying silk blouses around our legs under the army pants and walking out. I still wear some of those blouses today.”
“We all wore this cologne called The Baron, and patchouli oil, we got it at Wanamaker’s,” recalled Joe McDevit. “She’d get that during her daily shopping trips.”
Sometimes, Gia would go into Bonwit’s or Nan Duskin or Wanamaker’s and fill up an empty shopping bag, just to prove she could do it. Other times, she had specific goals in mind: birthday gifts, courtship presents.
Gia had fallen for a girl she met in the clubs called Nina*, a working-class Roxborough native with Main Line airs and long blond hair. Nina saw a silk Halston dress in the window at Bonwit’s that she loved. She just had to have it. Gia snuck into the window, undressed the mannequin, and smuggled out the dress. When Nina broke up with her, Gia cut up the dress with a pair of scissors.
Gia and some of her friends would also steal credit cards. Joanne Grossman, an established hairstylist in her midtwenties when she met fifteen-year-old Gia in an all-women’s club, was among those who had their credit cards stolen. Several days after the theft, Gia quietly came and told her where the cards were.
“I thought she did a lot of this stuff to get her mother’s attention,” recalled Grossman. “Gia had the kind of personality that yielded to a baby-sitter sometimes. She needed guidance—whether a mother, a lover, a sister, a nanny. She needed not to be left alone. And the one person she really wanted was her mother. Kathleen obviously wanted her own life and wanted her daughter to be strong enough to do it on her own, without her doing anything.”
By this time, it was clear that Gia’s living situation with her father wasn’t going to work out so well: her new stepmother was now pregnant, and Gia missed Lincoln and her friends in the Northeast. So she moved back in with her mother and stepfather. Kathleen was determined that things would not get out of control again, and tried to be much stricter than before. She dragged Gia to the family doctor and insisted he test her blood for the presence of cocaine. When she tested positive but denied having taken anything, Kathleen dragged her back again. The doctor refused to do the test. “What are you going to do?” Kathleen recalled the doctor telling her. “She went out, she partied, she did a little drugs. What are you going to do?”
None of Gia’s friends recalled her doing any more drugs than anybody else was doing at the time. “People did a lot of Quaaludes back then,” recalled Michael Carangi, who was in a position to know. “Gia didn’t drink a lot, she smoked pot, did ludes, did some acid. It wasn’t a big thing to her.”
“Gia loved Quaaludes,” recalled Toni O’Connor, who, by that time, was maintaining her new lifestyle by selling the big, pale-yellow sedatives. “Sometimes I thought Gia only loved me because I always had Quaaludes. I was, in my day, the Quaalude queen of Philadelphia—although I was so paranoid about getting busted that I told everyone I was a prostitute. I made a lot of money selling Quaaludes. I’d just go to the doctors and get them anytime. I had three different doctors I would go to. I would tell them I couldn’t sleep at night. Each doctor was good for thirty Quaaludes every two weeks. One doctor would mail prescriptions from California, can you believe it?”
Others in Gia’s crowd had also discovered the Quaalude doctors. “I started going to a lot of the Quaalude doctors with a couple other friends,” recalled Roseanne Rubino. “We’d make the circuit. There was one doctor, this seedy little fag, always fucked up on something. He had this awful cinder block office in West Philly. You’d go and wait for hours with slimy people. He had this big sign: THE DOCTOR DOES NOT DISPENSE THE DRUGS. You’d sit down with him. He’d say, ‘What seems to be the problem?’ You’d say, ‘I can’t sleep, I’m trying to lose weight.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to prescribe methaqualone and Valium,’ and black beauties, whatever they were called. He’d give us these incredible prescriptions for great drugs.
“I started doing the Quaalude doctors after Ronnie Johnson and I broke up. That’s also when Gia and I had our little affair. She told me she was in love with me the first time we slept together. I thought that was kind of weird. I guess that, somehow, love wasn’t supposed to be part of it.”
“I know there were a lot of drugs,” recalled Joanne Grossman, “but in Gia’s case, at that point, I think her sexual habits were a lot more extreme than her drugs.”
“She was as promiscuous as everyone else in our group,” recalled a high school friend. “Pull out the phone book and I’ll tell you who I dated. I think there’s a memorial to me on the front lawn at Lincoln.”
“All our sex lives then were so bizarre,” recalled Joe McDevit. “I remember this huge orgy in a synagogue. We were all at Digits one night doing acid, and one of the guys announced that he had keys to a synagogue nearby—his father worked there or something. We went there, upstairs to this big conference room, put cushions on the floor and had this big party. At one point we dared my girlfriend to put on a show for us. She had never slept with a girl and she picked another girl who hadn’t either and they took off all their clothes and made love. Then I had to pick a boy who had never had sex with another boy, and we had fun, petting and fellatio and such. It was bizarre.”
As an alternative to the kinds of people Gia was encountering in the clubs and at concerts, photographer Joe Petrellis—who had become socially friendly with Kathleen and Henry—suggested that she meet his friend Jane Kirby Harris. A tall, handsome woman in her late thirties, Harris was a former New York runway model and a fixture in Philadelphia. She was fashion director for the Philadelphia area Bonwit Teller stores and coordinated all their fashion shows. She maintained her reputation and continually expanded her public by teaching beauty and modeling courses.
In the store, she ran a beauty workshop for the daughters of Bonwit’s patrons, taught with manuals made available to retailers by Seventeen magazine and personalized by each instructor. Harris called her version “Project You.” The Seventeen course was devised to give young girls the basics of posture, exercise, diet, hair care, skin care, makeup, grooming, fashion and manners. By providing the service, the store hoped girls would come to Bonwit’s for the many products they had just learned to need—including makeup applied every day “at least twice, even three times if you can.”
One of the longest chapters in the manual—and the only one that did not contain practical information pertinent to all young girls—was the one about fashion modeling. It began with a lengthy excerpt from a Seventeen article by Eileen Ford, of the Ford Model Agency, about “what it takes to join the ranks of today’s top models.” Besides the basics of the model’s life, the excerpt pointed out that, at most, one in one thousand of the girls who applied to Ford became successful models. The manual then asked girls if they felt they met all the requirements to be a professional model. “NO! Perhaps you should do non-professional modeling through your local store’s teen board. However, if the answer is YES, and you do want to go full-steam ahead to a modeling career …”
Harris regarded the in-store course as a mere trifle compared to the intensive modeling sessions she gave several nights a week in the grand ballroom at the Bellevue Stratford hotel. There, the girls with even the slightest bit of promise would be painstakingly trained in actual modeling techniques. Harris paid special attention to walking: it had been considered her great talent as a runway girl, and was a skill she felt that even many top models had failed to master. She couldn’t stand it when Bonwit’s would bring a top girl down from New York for a big show and the girl couldn’t even walk properly; it was better to use a local girl who had been properly trained.
Harris’ course was meant to turn out models—or at least good “nonprofessional models.” And she did differentiate between girls who “had something” and those who had nothing but enough money to pay the fee. That distinction separated her from the local franchise of the national John Robert Powers schools, which had been spun off from New York’s first-ever model agency. Begun in the thirties and, for years, so synonymous with the profession that it spawned the 1942 film comedy The Powers Girl with George Murphy and Dermis Day, the Powers agency itself had been toppled by Eileen Ford in the fifties. But its schools lived on, surviving by adopting a new creed: If you didn’t have the looks to be a model, you could at least learn to be a “model girl.”
A “model girl” knew the basics of Good Grooming: her face shape, her body type, the hues that best suited her, professional makeup techniques and how to achieve that “well-put-together look.” She understood the building blocks of Visual Poise: proper placement of hands and feet, how to enter and exit a room (both the informal three-touch method and the formal four-touch method, each including a hesitation for effect). And she minded her many Manners, like the rules of Cigarette Etiquette: “Avoid looking masculine, never dangle the cigarette in your mouth, never flick ashes man-style, always use a feminine cigarette case and lighter.” Powers was sort of a charm school for girls who would have to get real jobs eventually.
Gia’s Aunt Nancy also signed up for Jane Harris’s course. Gia still looked up to her aunt in some ways, but many of her new friends were Nancy’s age or older, so the two had effectively become peers. There was also such a strong family resemblance between them that they looked like sisters—although Nancy was pretty in a more conventional, less ethnic way, and she wore all the feminine clothing and makeup that Gia rejected.
Nancy led Jane Harris to believe that she was signing up for the course as a favor to Gia, whom she sort of watched over. She explained to Harris that Gia was the way she was—distant, generally uncommunicative—because she came from a broken home and had some drug problems. While there was some truth to this, Nancy was hardly taking the course just to look out for her niece. She hoped that there might be a place for her in modeling. Nancy had never vigorously pursued it. She was working as a bank teller, filling in at Hoagie City. And she was, at twenty-one, already a little old to begin modeling. But people had always told Nancy that she was the prettiest of the Adams sisters. And she looked like a model. It was something to dream about. It was certainly something she dreamed about more than Gia ever did.
Jane Harris found Gia difficult to talk with, but she was taken by her looks and her ability to coordinate clothes. “There was an innate sense you felt,” she recalled, “this girl was so put together, without being contrived. I don’t know if the clothes were expensive, but she looked fashion. And she did well in the course. She learned to walk beautifully.
“I wanted her to go to Eileen Ford after she was done with me. But she disappeared off the face of the earth. I remember her class well because we held graduation at the Bellevue and that was the summer of Legionnaires’ disease.”
Besides the runway classes, Gia also answered an ad in the paper for amateur models at Gimbels department store. “We had always used regular models, and then somebody decided we should try ten-dollar-an-hour models and just have a cattle call,” recalled well-known Philadelphia photographer Michael Ahearn, who was then director of fashion photography for the store. “Most of the people were just awful, and then in comes this little girl and she was wonderful. She was always late, always had some excuse. The fashion director used to get pissed and wanted to shoot without her. And she sometimes came in bruised up. She said that her stepfather did it because she was running around late. We had to patch up the bruises. But I used her as much as I could, even when she wasn’t really right for the shots. I remember stuffing up her chest and behind the straps in the back so we could use her for these ads for old ladies’ bras.
“She had a way of looking at you at certain times. It was this look, the face of a little girl. She learned how to drop it for the camera, but sometimes I would still see it.”
Joe Petrellis also did another series of tests with her: this time, in more sophisticated poses and clothes, including a purple see-through blouse with nothing underneath. “She projected like a cheetah,” he recalled. “She was born to be in front of the camera. The way she would move … she knew her face, she knew her body. She was born with that. She was born to model. And it was no big deal to her. She was only doing modeling because she needed something to do.”
Petrellis also suggested that Gia go see Paul Midiri, who ran the top modeling agency in Philadelphia. She went with her mother, who did most of the talking, and Midiri put her in his teen division. But nothing happened. “She didn’t get one booking with us,” said Midiri. “The trend toward using younger models and making them look older hadn’t yet caught on in Philadelphia. She had a mildly ethnic and exotic look, which Philadelphia just wasn’t that familiar with. She was also a little rough around the edges. In New York, you can get away with that because there are makeup artists at the shootings. In Philadelphia, you’re expected to be more of a complete package.”
As she did more modeling, Gia started paying more attention to the names in the credits in the fashion magazines her mother got. In her journals, along with the rock lyrics, she would errantly jot down the name of a photographer or a designer or a model she had noticed: itineraries of imaginary modeling trips and technical information she gleaned from photographers soon followed.
“We would sit in Gia’s bedroom,” recalled Nancy Adams, “and try on clothes, putting ultrasuede outfits together to be fashionable. Patti Hansen was on the cover of Vogue for, like, five months in a row. Gia said all she wanted to do was one cover of Vogue: that was it, just one cover.”
After their classes with Jane Harris, Gia and Nancy sometimes walked like ladies to the clubs, many of which were only a few blocks from the Bellevue. They often went to a women-only bar, because that’s where Gia said she felt the most relaxed.
“I loved to go out with Gia and Nancy,” remembered Joanne Grossman. “You could sit at the bar and have every single decent-looking person in the room come over. Gia never moved, and Nancy just kept everyone at bay. I used to just love to sit on a bar stool and watch this: it was a night in itself. And you never had to pay for a drink.
“Gia just had this charisma. She wasn’t extremely smart and she didn’t have extremely interesting things to talk about, which bothered her. She thought of herself as sexually boring, too. She used to say, ‘People look at me and they think I’m this beautiful thing and I must be extremely hot. And what they don’t realize is that I’m extremely boring…’
“Nancy played around. I was involved with her on and off for many years and I finally had to accept it: she was straight. She just loved people in different ways. I wouldn’t even say she was clearly bisexual. Just because you have one or two people who come into your life and you’re sexual with them doesn’t mean that you’re gay.”
The biggest, newest club in town was the DCA—or, as Gia and her friends referred to it, the “DCGay.” It was a cavernous building hidden from plain sight on a small, pedestrian-only street. The main floor was devoted to the kind of flamboyant, multimedia disco scene that a new generation of gay men were coming to favor. But DCA was large enough to have a separate floor just for women.
“Oh, it was a scene up there on the second floor,” recalled Toni O’Connor. “We all lived in our own little world, nobody else could get in, we could do whatever we wanted. One night I can remember at the club, Gia had this water pistol and we were in the ladies’ bathroom taking pictures of each other and shooting the gun. She was just posing with the gun. We had such a good time. Sometimes we would all dress in three-piece suits. We were like the gay Mafia.”
“I remember one night at the DCA,” said Roseanne Rubino, “Ronnie showed up with his new boyfriend. We were all very fucked up: I was hanging with a new bunch of weirds then. Gia was there. Gia was always there. When we walked into the place, we would immediately go get a drink: Southern Comfort Manhattans were the big thing. Somebody had Quaaludes, we were all dancing. I had this, like, white thing on—white shirt and pants. All I know is that I woke up on the men’s room floor and it was about four A.M. and the place was closing. Ronnie and his boyfriend took me home.
