To nonbelievers, and those whose livelihood depended on Mr. Maurice remaining a haircutter, his “testing” was nothing more than a waste of valuable coif time and a hobby with very expensive equipment. It was a joke, a drain of his creative energy. Only Maurice understood why he had to keep doing it.
The actual picture-taking was only one part of testing. After Maurice paid a lab to develop the film, he had to edit the shots. This was the other essential process in fashion photography: lining up images and winnowing away at them. Usually, Maurice worked with thirty-five-millimeter slides, which came back from the lab in a hard plastic box, or with 2¼-inch-square transparencies, which came back in oversize strips. The transparent images were laid on a light table and surveyed through a magnifying eyepiece called a loop. With a grease pencil, he marked the images worth looking at again and then separated them from the others.
Editing was an inexact science, especially since it was easy to see something different in a picture every time you looked at it. It was also a very personal science: ultimately, the only thing Maurice was gauging was which image was more interesting to
him
at that particular moment. And learning the process of taking your aesthetic pulse, making a decision and living with it—and, in fact,
celebrating
it by making a
beautiful print of the image, showing it around as your Work—was perhaps more important than the choice itself.
Once the best shots were chosen, Maurice had to decide how to print them. Should parts of the image be cropped away? Should colors be corrected? Should certain areas of the picture be printed darker or lighter than the rest? Or should the image be printed “full frame,” exactly as the camera and photographer originally saw it, untouched by thoughts that came after the preserved moment?
Maurice had begun doing test shots in the back of his salon on free evenings and on locations near his farm in Bucks County on weekends. He chose models from among his younger clients and friends, and sometimes he would approach girls on the street or in clubs and ask if they would consider working with him. In a city like Philadelphia, with three major art colleges, any number of beauty-related trade schools and a handful of modeling agencies, there were always many people involved in what could loosely be defined as testing. But being asked to test by Mr. Maurice, a well-known personality in a town with few resident celebrities, was a real honor—second only to being asked to work with one of the city’s few full-time fashion photographers.
One night at the DCA, Maurice spotted Gia on the main dance floor. He took her aside and asked if she would test with him. She came in on a Thursday evening, he made her up and did some shots, and she returned several days later to view the finished results. They found they got along so well that it became a weekly date.
“It happened that every Thursday night I’d shoot her,” Maurice recalled. “And while we did it we talked. It’s a very personal thing to work like that—especially when you’re doing the hair and makeup, too, you’re right up close. She was really shy and quiet, and she was totally untrusting. She was obviously used to being abused because she was so beautiful. People wanted to be around her because she was so beautiful. They didn’t care who Gia was; her mind and her person weren’t important to them. It was only important that she was beautiful and she was this thing they could carry around with them. She had become very hardened to that. She realized it young, and tried to protect herself.
“This girl had done
everything
by the time she was sixteen.
She had tried almost every drug, had all kinds of sex, and she was going with a very fast crowd. She liked being the center of attention. If I shot her with other people and they got the attention, she’d get pissed. Yet she seemed, deep down, to be a regular sixteen-year-old kid, wholesome, loving, involved with her family. She loved kids—because they were pure and going to love her for the right reasons.
“And it was pure things that made her laugh, simple things. Once she came up to our house in New Hope for the weekend and I gave her a haircut outside. It was really windy and as we were cutting her hair it was drying. She would bring that up every once in a while, the memory of having her hair cut and letting it dry in the wind. That was fun for her.”
By the fall of 1977, Gia was thinking about joining the thousands of girls who annually took a shot at modeling. Her face and body had matured in such a way that a successful career was now more than just a fantasy of hers or her mother’s or her Aunt Nancy’s. And it wasn’t as if modeling would interfere with her going to college or pursuing some other dream. She was really just killing time, working parttime at Hoagie City—like her brothers—and following in the wobbly career paths of her older friends.
The hardcore Bowie fans never took jobs they couldn’t afford to quit in order to perform some outrageous act of worship. (Toni O’Connor and Joey Bowie, for example, left town unannounced to follow David to LA and then drove to Arizona to crash the set of
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, in which Bowie was making his major film debut. They were supposed to be extras in the film, but were prematurely banished from the location after Angie Bowie drunkenly seduced Toni to get her husband upset.) The club kids worked as assistants in salons or as salespeople in fashionable stores by day and then slept from dinner until midnight so they could dance the night away at the night spot of the moment. A number of the Lincoln girls had already realized that the party was over. Two of the 107 Lunchroom crowd were already getting outpatient help for drug problems. Another disappeared after discovering she was pregnant too late to
get an abortion: she quietly carried the baby to term and put it up for adoption.
Gia had no idea what she wanted to be. And unlike the young women who saw a modeling career as something they would do
anything
to have, Gia considered professional posing the path of absolute
least
resistance. Everyone she knew was encouraging her to do it, everyone seemed to agree that she was destined for it. And it was the only career path that even vaguely interested her that she also knew her mother would approve of.
Gia had never been ordered to model, but she knew that the pictures with Joe Petrellis and the department store ads were among the very few things she did that really pleased Kathleen. The modeling allowed Gia’s mother to vicariously live the life she had wanted for herself as a teenage glamour girl. It also produced photographic evidence of the womanly, feminine daughter that Kathleen believed was trapped in Gia’s man-woman body. While Kathleen had encouraged Gia’s modeling, she had never been truly overbearing about it. And there was, at the moment, an international standard for such overbearance: Teri Shields, mother of child model Brooke Shields.
Teri’s name had been mentioned passingly in gossip columns for years, but she had finally captured the media’s attention and revulsion during the pre-publicity for Louis Malle’s
Pretty Baby
, in which her twelve-year-old Brooke played a child prostitute. In a September 26, 1977,
New York
magazine cover story on Brooke, Teri was portrayed as a bitter divorcée who drank too much and had all but sold into slavery the beautiful child of her five-month marriage to a Revlon executive. The lives of the mother and daughter seemed hopelessly, even dangerously intertwined. If the basic facts of Brooke’s career didn’t raise eyebrows—her mother had been dragging her into photographers’ studios since infancy, and had never discouraged nude shots—Teri’s widely circulated quotes in the magazine story were sure to send the world’s tongues clicking. She went on about how Brooke’s “titties” had sprouted and she got her first period between the time she was cast and the actual filming-discussing her daughter like she was a particularly prime piece of livestock.
Although she certainly had dreams of her daughter becoming a model, Kathleen was no Teri Shields. But not long after Gia finished her senior year of high school—again, in summer session—her mother became more aggressive in her encouragement. In October, Kathleen and Henry arranged with Joe Petrellis for Gia to meet a modeling agent during the intermission of a Donna Summer concert. The agent was impressed, and said he might send Gia over to Europe the following summer—along with Petrellis’ wife, model Patty Herron—to test and try out for some of the photography and runway jobs generated by the collections in Paris, Rome and Milan. Petrellis also offered to use his connections with Eileen Ford to get Gia an interview with the Ford agency.
Gia decided on her own that losing a little weight wouldn’t be a bad idea, since she had a tendency to be a little chunky below the waist. “I remember her eating cereal with water on it to try and get skinnier,” recalled one friend. “And she would take an hour to eat it so she wouldn’t be hungry later.”
Ultimately, it was Maurice Tannenbaum’s photos that made the difference. As his body of work grew and he began taking his photography more seriously, Maurice decided to hire a makeup artist instead of doing it himself. Making that further commitment to the testing process was another way to separate Mr. Maurice from Maurice Tannenbaum, fashion photographer. Like so many people at every level of the beauty business, the makeup artist he hired was a former model. She had remained friendly with her old agent, Wilhelmina Behmenburg Cooper—known to the fashion public simply as Wilhelmina since the sixties, when she was one of the world’s top fashion models.
Willie, as she was called by close associates, was always looking for new models, and Wilhelmina Models Inc. also had an entire testing division where promising photographers could shoot new girls in the company’s studios. The makeup artist offered to show Maurice’s book—which, by this time, was almost all shots of Gia—to Willie. The model agent was impressed enough to summon both Gia and Maurice to New York, at their own expense, to be seen.
Kathleen, Gia, Maurice and the makeup artist drove to New York together in January for the meeting at the
agency’s offices on Thirty-seventh Street just off Fifth Avenue. At Gia’s request, Kathleen waited in a coffee shop across the street while the hopeful trio rode the small elevator to the twelfth-floor office. The small front lobby was, as usual, overflowing with young (and pretending-to-be-young) women, all waiting to be looked over by a member of the Wilhelmina staff and, god-willing, by Wilhelmina herself. Some of the girls ended up sitting on the floor, trying to minimize the mussing of the outfits they had been planning for weeks, months or even years in anticipation of the ultimate blind date, the five-minute beauty pageant.
The screenings were done by a core group of three or four people who were nearly exact physical opposites of the statuesque, Dutch-born, antelopian model whose magazine covers adorned the lobby walls. Like many of their contemporaries at other agencies, the division heads and top bookers at Wilhelmina tended to be small, plain, comforting women and men, as often as not battling with weight problems. They had made professions of being the homely, sensible friends of pretty girls. They dressed in loose, casual clothes and had calming voices, which could make even the most brutally blunt comments seem somehow constructive.
At the front desk, a receptionist repeated the litany of screening questions to each expectant caller: “How tall are you?” “How much do you weigh?” “How old are you?” “How long is your hair?” Any incorrect answer would be used as a way to emphatically dissuade the caller from spending her life savings to come to New York just to give the same incorrect answer in person.
Many of the young girls came anyway. The model fantasy was too deeply ingrained. It began in the mid-1800s when a Parisian shopgirl at the fashionable Gagelin et Opigez named Marie Vernet married a salesman at the store, Charles Worth, an Englishman with designs on designing. After winning an international award for his crinoline hoopskirts, Worth began his own business and Marie became his model—the first human “mannequin.” (Marie also turned out to be the birth mother of the
couture:
she convinced the wife of the Austrian ambassador to try her husband’s crinolines, which led to his becoming the first
grand couturier
to European royalty.)
But the Victorian fantasy of a shopgirl being able to wear the clothes she once sold had given way to something more powerful in twentieth-century America. With the rise of fashion photography, models grew from glorified salespeople into women whose lives might actually resemble the fantasy images they were employed to create. The top models became professional muses, quasi-celebrities, visual role models, human billboards. And then they even started getting paid.
When American women started thinking about careerism, it was hard to overlook the fact that, as a recently published history of the “model girl” had flatly stated in its first sentence, “Today modeling is the most highly paid profession a young girl can enter.” Cinderella had met Miss America and the Working Woman. When the Kenner Toy Company did market research in its endless quest to dethrone Mattel’s Barbie Doll, it found that America’s little girls had a new primary fantasy. They wanted to be models. A new model doll named “D’Arcy” was being developed.
With Brooke Shields breaking all the age barriers, the pool of young girls trying to fulfill the model dream had doubled almost overnight. The offices of the few nationally recognized gatekeepers to the world of modeling were jammed like never before. Those who actually made it to the lobby sat and listened to the receptionist trying to dissuade others. The discouraging words gave the girls-in-waiting pause, and almost simultaneously fortified their resolve that the industry standards would be waived for them.
Many of those who came in were being weighed, measured, briefly interrogated and then completely discouraged from modeling—although the bad news often came in the form of encouragement to try some other fashion-related field. They walked back through the lobby after their bubble-bursting interviews with stunned looks on their faces, barely holding back the tears from what was often the first rejection of their lives. Another tier of girls was encouraged, however slightly, but not accepted. They were given a firm “perhaps” with several concrete suggestions. Screeners knew that a certain number of the girls would actually do what they were told they needed to do—lose weight, radically change their looks, expend endless amounts of time, money
and emotional virginity trying to get better pictures, and “come back to see us” in a prescribed number of weeks or months. And they would do it without any real commitment, financial or otherwise, from the agency. These were the girls who walked out stupefied, but full of firm resolve. They had a mission and a timetable and hope. Many would also soon have an appointment for a second opinion at another of the big agencies.