“After he finished, I think he thought he totally swept her away with his great tirade, and she basically just turned, lifted her head up and said, ‘If I look so fucking good why don’t you get me a joint?’
“That was her response to all this poetry … all she wanted to do was get high. And then he came back with a huge pink joint, which she proceeded to smoke and she was just totally out of it.”
Many photographers would not find such behavior amusing. In fact, some were already finding Gia to be a chore: she made everything harder than it needed to be. But Stember thought he saw something more behind her contentiousness than another dumb, spoiled model trying to make everyone’s life miserable.
“I had a lot of fun times with her,” he said. “But, basically, if you told Gia black, she would say white. If you told her to go left, she would go right. If you told her to sit there, she would stand. Whatever you told her to do, she would do the opposite and she did it to the biggest people in this business. They didn’t know what hit them. They’d never seen anything like it. Normally, the girls are like ‘Fuck me, fuck me, I’ll do anything for you.’ Gia was just fuck you.’
“I have never met anybody who did it in the way that she did. It was so totally self-destructive—it was the way she dealt with herself, too. But she’d put a knife to your throat if you told her that. She had this anger, you know, this tremendous anger. It took a lot of ducking and diving to put up with her. She had to see you weren’t going to hit her back. I didn’t need to hit her: she was doing it all for me. So I just was her friend. She would take you and
pow
, just to see what you would do. If you didn’t get mad, then she’d begin to trust. But when she started to trust you, she’d feel guilty,
pow
, just for no reason.
“You see somebody like her and you become more aware of the human condition at its extreme end. Here’s a girl who’s extremely beautiful and in extreme pain. And you have to ask yourself: Why is someone who looks this way in so much pain?”
If her pain was obvious to everyone Gia worked with, so was her rapidly expanding appeal. She was on the cover of the April 1979 issues of American
Cosmopolitan
, British
Vogue
and French
Vogue.
Her first
Cosmo
cover sold spectacularly, as did the brown Norma Kamali unitard in which she appeared. Even though editor Helen Gurley Brown normally preferred Scavullo to shoot twelve different girls each year, another Gia cover was immediately ordered.
She was overwhelmed with attention after the covers, especially the highly visible
Cosmopolitan.
She finally knew what it meant to be “that
Cosmopolitan
girl.” It meant a large percentage of the U.S. population went to bed dreaming of being
with
you or being you. And the funny thing was, the picture didn’t really even look that much like her. Few of them did. For someone with such a strong, identifiable “look,” it was amazing how different Gia appeared in every photograph. She had a hard time recognizing herself sometimes. The photographs took on a life of their own once they were printed and published and distributed. It was like the old Woody Allen stand-up routine that was currently being rediscovered in the wake of his wildly successful films: she saw a life passing before her eyes, but it wasn’t her life.
“Gia had an interesting analogy about glamour,” recalled one friend. “She said, ‘You go to a movie or a play or you look at a magazine, and when you’re in the audience, you see it’s all glamorous. On the other side, they’re lookin’ out at you and they know it’s
work.
And somewhere in the middle is the glamour and nobody ever really gets it.’”
The work seemed very empty but far too financially rewarding to give up. But Gia was so alone in New York: what little support she had was shaky. She and Sharon Beverly had had their last, “last fight” some time ago. The diminutive makeup artist had moved out, to an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, and turned a chance conversation at the Fiorucci makeup counter into a partnership with the legendary Patricia Field, whose namesake boutique had made her downtown’s most established fashion innovatrix. Since the early seventies, the flamboyant, openly gay Field had been among the first major retailers to merchandise a New York look that was an alternative to Seventh Avenue.
Her store became a showcase for each new pop look before it was shipped to the suburbs, and from its location on East Eighth Street—straddling the boundary between the West and East Villages—she served as the fashion commentator of the hip, the Ms. Blackwell of downtown.
In her spare time, Sharon had been ambitiously designing a makeup line and hand-customizing paint boxes for her radical colors. Field bankrolled Sharon to produce the makeup line for her store: it was eventually successfully marketed under the brand name G-Method. The partnership firmly established Sharon as part of the downtown world, and she became more involved with the Warhol crowd and the Mudd Club scene—where Gia was a frequent, friendly visitor from uptown, but still a slumming fashion type. Sharon and Gia remained friendly, but were barely involved in each other’s lives.
Gia’s mother came to visit, but Kathleen was becoming more fan than friend. Some of Gia’s friends from Philadelphia were staying away because they thought that was what Gia wanted. Nobody understood what she was going through.
Her brother Michael was one of the few family members who visited her in New York. But he didn’t take her hints that she might want him to move there. “The mistake we made was that nobody went with her,” he recalled. “She could’ve used a friend. Of course, she said she didn’t
want
anyone. But she could’ve used me or her mother—like Brooke Shields had her mother with her. Sometimes she would ask me to look for a job in New York. I didn’t realize until later that she wanted me to be up there for her.”
Karen Karuza
had
moved to New York to go to design school; she was living not far away in Brooklyn. But she always got mixed signals from Gia. “She’d phone me and want to talk about all kinds of things,” she recalled. “We’d talk for hours. She told me about meeting Salvador Dalí. She said she was supposed to have dinner with him one night but she wasn’t going. I asked why and she said, ‘Because I’m not hungry.’ That was typical Gia.
“Gia and I would be having these in-depth conversations and the operator—this is before call-waiting—kept beeping in saying someone else wanted to get through, and she was
saying, ‘Forget it.’ She would talk about how she wasn’t sure if people cared about her or Gia the girl on the cover of
Cosmo.
“Then I would call her and she’d be very short with me. ‘I’m going to England, you think it’s so glamorous, it’s work.’
Click.
That was Gia, you just never knew. Then she’d call and have tickets for a Valentino show for me. But we started drifting apart. People kept saying to me, ‘You’ve got this friend, she’s a big model.’ She was my friend, but I didn’t want to
use
that in any way, shape or form. I didn’t want to push it with her. I knew the type of person she was. That conversation about the fact that it was work made me think there were enough people popping out of the woodwork.”
Other people from Philadelphia needed more attention than ever. Photographer Joe Petrellis’ model wife had left him and moved to New York with his assistant. “When I was going through my divorce and my pain,” recalled Petrellis, “Gia would call me up and say, ‘Joe, how are you? Things will look brighter for you. You’re a handsome man.’ She’d say, ‘Stop being a baby.’ This was the biggest baby in the world, telling me to stop being a baby. She cared, she took a genuine interest; sometimes she’d call every other day. Before she went to New York, we had been driving one day and that song, that ‘Hop on the bus, Gus’ song, came on. From then on she’d call and leave messages, ‘How you doin’, Gus? Let’s hop on that bus.’”
In mid-April, Gia asked Italian
Bazaar’s
Lizzette Kattan if she could move in with her for a while. It was fairly common in the fashion industry to have houseguests. Some stylist-friend was always in town for a few days and didn’t want to stay in a hotel, and some model, no matter how successful, was always between apartments. During her modeling career, Lizzette had certainly counted on the hospitality of colleagues around the globe. So she was happy to let Gia stay over, even though it was unclear whether Gia was really between apartments or just wanted someone to take care of her for a few days.
“Gia liked my mother a lot,” Lizzette recalled. “My mother wasn’t living with me in New York, but when I was
there I would like her to be with me. I took her everywhere. Gia stayed with us, it was very nice. The only problem was that she was always carrying on with the cigarettes. I don’t like anybody smoking around me.
“I spoke to Gia’s mother on the telephone, because she called to see if Gia was living at my house and why she was there. The mother asked me blankly if I was sexually or physically involved with Gia. I told her I had no interest in Gia except trying to be a mother for her. Another time when Gia had left her own apartment, the mother called me and wanted to know where she had gone. I called Gia and said, ‘Call your mother and tell her what is going on.’ They didn’t really have the best of relationships. Obviously, the mother was interested in how the daughter was doing, what was going on: she seemed concerned, very normal motherly concern. Gia just couldn’t care less about telling her.”
While Gia stayed with her, Lizzette also got a glimpse at what passed for her support system in New York. “Gia had a lot of obscure friends,” she recalled. “She had a way of coming in and out of people’s lives, with such speed and so briefly: I think it was hard for her to have relationships for any length of time. You would see her for four hours but you would remember those four hours. I think Sandy is the one Gia spent the most time with.”
Increasingly, Gia’s colleagues had come to perceive her as a very cruisy bisexual who came on to most of the women she worked with but had some kind of ongoing relationship with Sandy Linter—or, as ongoing as two full-time freelancers who worked and parried around the world could be. Those who were closer to her believed she was more flirtatious than promiscuous.
“She was definitely bisexual,” said John Stember, “but she didn’t have a lot of sexual relationships, I’ll tell you that. She had major sexual problems, major. And for her to get into a sexual situation, it was not that easy at all. She wasn’t fucking around like crazy, at all. She had real difficulty with people. She could find very, very few people that she could spend any kind of time with and she spent a lot of time by herself, a lot of time. All this stuff with her image tends to make her out to be something she wasn’t. She had major
problems being alive, with herself and finding any kind of ground to be with herself, which was why she was taking drugs most of the time because it alleviated the pain.”
In the meantime, she was developing a coterie of fair-weather fans and first-name-only drug connections—like Raul, who worked out of an apartment in the East Village and serviced a lot of the uptown fashion people. Gia had many work friends, play friends and drug friends. But few
real
friends.
“There were a lot of hangers-on with her,” said Sean Byrnes. “That happens with a lot of people, if you let it, which is why most of the top girls don’t hang out anymore. If you hang out, you get a lot of not-so-nice people. I knew a lot of people who wanted her. I knew her boyfriends and her girlfriends. Just guys, kids who used to hang out at the Mudd Club. She had an affair with a girl or two but many affairs with guys. She was just young and playing around.”
“She had a whole pack of little liar friends,” recalled John Long, who at the time was selling lithographs through ads in the back of
Vogue
and
Philadelphia
and was writing for small magazines like
Night.
“And they all seemed to have these real
stories
, you know. One was, like, an interior decorator and a brain surgeon. It’s part of being enterprising, I suppose.”
Blondie’s keyboard player Jimmy Destri recalled her as part of a crowd that was “an offspring of the circle I went in: you know, there’s always sort of smaller gears around each person’s main group.” Even though Sharon Beverly remembered Destri “falling madly in love with Gia at first sight” when they had met the band in Philadelphia the year before, he had no recollection of the incident whatsoever. She was just one more pretty girl being brought around to meet him. Destri remembered meeting Gia later at Hurrah’s, a pre-Studio disco on West Sixty-second that had been reborn in 1979 as the only downtown-style rock club that was uptown. No romance had ensued, but Jimmy was a pool player, and, when they were both in town, they occasionally shot a few games on the table in the backroom at CBGB’s and at the bowling club around NYU.
“New York was different then,” Destri recalled, “people hung out at the rock clubs because there was no scene besides
the rock ‘n’ roll scene. In the eighties, the restaurants were hot spots. But back then, there were no dinner clubs. There was Hurrah’s, CBGB’s, Mudd Club, Max’s, that’s it. After hours, there was a place on Thirteenth or Fourteenth near Third where they used to frisk you when you went in. The Nursery. I went there once with David Bowie and they thought he was an imposter and frisked him as well.” The Nursery was one of the only after-hours clubs with a pool table, but there was an entire circuit of places that didn’t open until three or four in the morning—full of the people who were, in the words of one habitué, “fueled and edgy because they were still out and still hadn’t gotten laid and just kept going and going until they were a step or two below psychosis.”
John Long had always taken a paternal attitude with Gia, but watching out for her was getting more and more difficult. Long recalled seeing Gia stagger into the Ritz one night—before a show by former Philadelphians Hall and Oates—and confronting the guy she had come with, a fairly obvious drug date. He pulled the guy into the Ritz bathroom, and their shouting match finally led to a fight which Long, a martial arts instructor, had no trouble ending quickly. Gia called him the next day, screaming about what he had done to her friend, and their friendship cooled after that. He realized then that someone else would have to stop her from blowing a chance that few were ever afforded.