All these companies and products met on the pages of the publications. The monthly magazines and weekly newspaper
magazines printed all these advertisements, along with stories and “editorial” photographs of the products in use. The women’s magazines did the most editorial photography in fashion and beauty every month, but others had begun to follow suit, hoping that coverage would lead to fashion advertising.
Every civilized country had its own indigenous beauty-industrial complex tied to its own standards of beauty, but there was a good bit of international overlap. Many American and European manufacturers either exported or created foreign divisions and licensees. The same was true for magazines:
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar
and
Cosmopolitan
all had separate foreign, and even foreign-language, editions.
But at the highest levels of fashion, national borders were superfluous. Some European and a few American designers were simply above all that, creating fabric fantasies that were shared the world over. Some models were the same way, their looks and careers transcending national boundaries.
Despite its vast power, the beauty-industrial complex was really just a huge nursery of fashionable babies that had to be fed and changed astonishingly often. At bare minimum, the manufacturers needed to reinvent part of their product lines once or twice a year. Many major advertising campaigns and catalogs changed quarterly. Most of the magazines came out monthly. And some larger department stores needed new newspaper ads every week or even
every day.
Invariably, these changes required new photographs, sketches and fashion shows, all of which required models.
Some companies trusted photographers or ad agency art directors to choose their models. Others had executives who wouldn’t dream of missing the entire thrilling process of picking “their girl”—a combination of judging a beauty pageant and choosing merchandise at a brothel. They scanned agency headsheets of professionally beautiful young women. They discussed the girls’ attributes and narrowed down the field. They often asked the agency for more pictures—perhaps bathing suit or lingerie shots—and sometimes even had a few of the girls come in person before picking a model. If the girl wasn’t free or wouldn’t work for the budgeted
price, she was replaced by someone else who was singularly perfect for the job.
Every fashion or beauty picture that was printed anywhere—as well as every picture that was rejected and reshot along the way—was cast by the same systematically arbitrary procedure. It was a process no simpler or more complicated than deciding what scarf or necktie to wear to work. The fact that hundreds of careers hung in the balance didn’t—or couldn’t—make the decisions any less capricious. And it was the ability to make such utterly arbitrary choices seem objective and
correct
that separated the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and those in between from everyone else in between.
Sharon was slowly learning the process of her business, figuring out where a beginning makeup artist might fit in among the manufacturers, the major salons that hired staff makeup people and the hundreds of editorial and advertising photographers who hired freelancers. She could see there was a lot of politics involved—more, it seemed, than in photography or modeling, where at least you had to have
some unique quality
to get ahead. The top makeup artists seemed to her almost completely interchangeable, their careers built on nothing more than contacts and friendships. Still, Sharon liked doing makeup, and she felt like she was basically on the right career ladder—although on a much lower rung than she had hoped for.
But after only a few weeks in New York, it became clear to Sharon that Gia wasn’t really suited for what she was trying to do. “She would go out on her go-sees and just hated it,” Sharon recalled. “She hated it from the beginning. She felt like a piece of meat. I know it’s an old cliché in the business, but that’s what she said. You take your portfolio around to thousands of photographers around the city, and they’re very cold-hearted when they look through the book. They flip through it while you’re standing there.
“I’m a makeup artist and I’ve had people look through my book like that. It’s very disillusioning. But it’s bad enough to have someone look at your art—what you do—that way. It’s another thing to have someone look at your person that way.
“She felt uncomfortable about doing it, but she knew she
was good at it. She also knew it was no big deal to
be
good at it … it wasn’t anything meaningful. But I would catch her every now and then, kind of looking in the mirror and giving a look that I knew was for the camera. She didn’t do this regularly or anything. I just caught her a couple of times doing it and we would both laugh about it. She would think it was a big joke.
“She was still so much like a little girl. She would come home from her day and throw her book to the side and put cartoons on. And there would be men all over the city daydreaming about her—men who had seen her or her book—and there she was watching cartoons.”
For the first few months Gia was as focused on making it as a model as she ever had been on anything in her life. She was playing the game, or at least her version of the game. She went where her booker sent her, showed up on time to appointments and attended agency classes. To a large degree, she did what she was told. But her behavior was not so much a sign of growing up as it was a testimony to her deep feelings for her boss and mentor. Gia was not accustomed to being so impressed by anyone, so influenced, so awed. But she had never met anyone like Willie before.
Wilhelmina Behmenburg Cooper was born and raised in Holland, and moved to Chicago with her family at the age of fifteen. It was there that she began to model, eventually finding favor with the one world-class fashion photographer who remained in Chicago long after his reputation rose to the top in New York: Victor Skrebneski. Wilhelmina became a Ford model in the early sixties—when the only way to be a professional model was to be represented by Eileen Ford—and had an amazing professional career.
Willie’s name hadn’t been as well-known as Jean Shrimpton’s or Twiggy’s. Both of them had become larger than life—and briefly bigger than modeling—because of their association with the sixties British Invasion in fashion and music. Shrimpton especially benefited from her professional and personal relationship with David Bailey, the British
Vogue
photographer. Bailey was the designated shutterbug of the Invasion and the likely inspiration for the 1966 Antonioni film
Blow Up
, the erotic thriller that cemented
the world’s image of the high-living fashion photographer, riding around in a Rolls-Royce and seducing models on the seamless paper used to make backgrounds disappear.
But Wilhelmina had actually done more magazine covers than Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy
combined.
And instead of disdaining her chosen profession and leaving as soon as her ability to make big money was secure, Wilhelmina stayed in modeling. While she was still at the peak of her earning power, she left Eileen Ford in 1967 to open her own agency with her new husband Bruce Cooper, a tall, Chet-Bakerly handsome, divorced TV producer she had met during her first appearance on
The Tonight Show.
Wilhelmina Models Inc. wasn’t designed to reinvent the wheel as much as make it a little smaller and rounder. Eileen Ford had invented the wheel. It was she—with her husband, Jerry—who had made modeling as professional and respectable as it was going to get, inventing a set of rules for billing and fair work that were, in their own way, as revolutionary as the first child labor laws. The Fords also created the prototype of the mom and pop with a percentage of earnings, taking new models into their own home to protect them from the big bad wolves of the fashion world. But Eileen Ford could be a harsh, conservative, overprotective and downright vindictive parent:
Life
magazine had called her “The Godmother.” And she ran what had become a very big business, over $10 million in annual billings, with an eye toward her bread-and-butter accounts: the middle-of-the-road magazine, catalog and advertising clients, who were looking for blond-haired, blue-eyed, flat-chested, all-American-looking girls. Wilhelmina had wanted a boutique agency that would cater to models like herself—more exotic, more ethnic, more high-fashion, sexier.
Financially, things hadn’t worked out according to plan. The agency struggled for years, paying bills with Willie’s modeling fees. Nearly a third of its billings were for TV commercials—which didn’t really interest Eileen Ford, unless they were for cosmetics or other fashion-related products—rather than fashion photography and print advertising. And just as Willie began successfully to create and then corner the market for girls with high-class looks and big attitudes, American fashion magazines began responding to
feminism and the rise in working women by becoming less fantasy-oriented and more practical. The agency was eventually forced to hire two Ford executives to broaden its roster to include some models with that increasingly popular “girl next door” look.
But Wilhelmina Models still had a reputation for sexier girls than Ford. It had begun with a roster of the more exotic Ford girls who followed Willie—like flamboyant Elsa Peretti, who had moved on to jewelry design, and Naomi Sims, one of the first top black models—and built a glitzy image with several high-profile launches. When Margaux Hemingway decided she wanted to parlay her beauty and name recognition into a modeling career, she debuted, and immediately won the contract for the Babe perfume ads, as a Wilhelmina Model. When photographer/socialite Peter Beard met Iman in Kenya and convinced her to come to America to model, she was signed with Wilhelmina, who helped concoct the preposterous—but salable—story that the upper-middle-class college student was actually an exotic African princess who had been discovered by Beard in the bush.
Wilhelmina had successfully linked her name to the model fantasy that was once exclusively Eileen Ford’s. Some young girls even knew enough to dream about Willie’s special “Hollywood Board,” where the agency’s top girls were handled by their own special bookers. The Hollywood Board was, at the moment, handling calls for Patti Hansen, the industry’s top blond cover girl, dark-haired Pam Dawber and Juli Foster, and black models Toukie Smith (a Philadelphian whose brother Willi would become a major designer) and Rasheeda Moore (who, many years later, would be the bait in the drug bust of Washington mayor Marion Barry).
Willie and Bruce Cooper had two children—besides Bruce’s from a previous marriage—and a personal relationship that many knew was on shaky ground. But their business was finally becoming established. It was finally not only hot, but solvent. That success was transforming the supermodel into a superwoman, possessed of a mature personal strength not always common in her industry.
She was offering a new kind of role model. The Ford model was, no matter how much the agency kept up with
the times, still somehow a creature of the fifties and early sixties. She was going to make some money and have some fun before marrying a really rich guy. She was, basically, a prude, or was expected to pretend to be. The Wilhelmina model was, like the agency itself, a creation of the late sixties and early seventies. The agency still sold sexual stereotypes and represented everything the growing women’s movement abhorred. But Wilhelmina attracted the kind of girls who drew that backhanded compliment of being described as “strong-willed.” They were, in the jargon of the business, “more modern.”
Gia felt very strongly about Wilhelmina, describing her as more than a role model. “I finally found a mother,” her uncle recalled her telling him during a visit home. She would also tell gay friends that she and Willie had been lovers. But several people who worked closely with Wilhelmina said they doubted she and Gia were involved in that way. “Gia got the customary amount of attention from Wilhelmina,” said one executive at the agency. “But my impression is that there were other models with whom Willie had a much closer relationship.”
“I could give you a list
this long
of people I’ve heard Gia was involved with,” said top hairstylist Harry King. “Some of them are laughable,
laughable.
Married women, famous women. I mean, it might be true, but it’s laughable.”
“I don’t believe they were involved, and I’d be surprised if they were even that close,” said Kay Mitchell, who was head of Wilhelmina’s women’s division. “I do remember Willie helping Gia a lot with her makeup and that kind of thing. I don’t know if Willie was ever involved with a female, although she had a very European attitude about sexuality in general. I remember once being horrified when one of the kids called from location and another female model had come on to her. She was very upset and didn’t know how to handle it. I went in to Wilhelmina and I was ready to kill the photographer because, well, I’m from Ohio, you know. Anyway, Willie just laughed at me. She wasn’t, like, mean or anything, she said ‘Kay, it’ll all work out. It will be okay.’ And it did all work out in the end. The model got more blasé about things and learned how to handle it, and I got
my eyes opened to the fact that my values were not necessarily the only values.
“I don’t think we saw Gia’s sexuality the same way Gia did. Everybody just thought she was like a puppy. I got that response from a lot of people, because no one was
offended
by Gia. It wasn’t like, ‘Damn, get the hell away from me!’ It was more like, ‘Gia, give me a break.’ You know? She was like a puppy, like somebody who needed love.”
M
anhattan in the late seventies was chaotic and decadent for those who could afford it and a voyeur’s paradise for those who could not. It was almost as if New York had responded to the famous 1975
Daily News
headline—“Ford to City: Drop Dead”—by giving up on the failing institutions of the daylight hours and going unquietly into that dark night. With the traditional infrastructure of the city crumbling, it was no surprise the public was looking for new heroes to replace the power politicians and captains of industry.