In early April of 1988, the morning show
AM Philadelphia
did a segment on AIDS. After the program aired, co-host Wally Kennedy received a phone call from a viewer who had been touched by it.
“She said, ‘I saw your show and I think it just scratched the surface,’” Kennedy recalled. “She said, ‘I’ve had some personal experience with AIDS. My daughter died of it. It really was such a waste. She was a great kid and had a lot going for her.’”
Kennedy asked the woman his standard questions: Who was she, what did she do, was she from Philadelphia? The woman said she was a suburban housewife. “She said, ‘My daughter was a pretty successful model in New York,’” Kennedy recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ thinking
every
mother’s daughter is a pretty successful model in New York.’ Then she said, ‘Her name was Gia.’
“I immediately took the woman’s name and asked around the station. Everybody had the same reaction I did. First, they had no idea Gia was dead. And second, they were shocked that she had died of AIDS. I called the woman back and asked her to come in and speak to one of our producers. After meeting with her, we decided to do a show.
“She wasn’t beating me over the head. She wasn’t hawking herself. It was a nice kind of mutual thing. I wanted her as much as she wanted me. The only reference she made was that ‘Some day somebody’s going to write a book about this.’ My guess is that a lawyer put a bug in her ear.”
Not long before Kathleen’s
AM Philadelphia
appearance her husband, Henry Sperr, moved out. He left Kathleen alone in the house in Richboro—except for her granddaughter. Joey Carangi’s thirteen-year-old daughter had moved in with the Sperrs the day Gia died, which raised a few eyebrows among family members—especially when she enrolled in an acting class at the John Casablancas Modeling and Career Center in nearby Langhorne.
“Henry claimed the separation was because of Gia,” said photographer Joe Petrellis, who had remained friendly with the family and still used Henry as his accountant.
“When Henry left after Gia had died, he had a lot of career problems at that point,” Kathleen recalled. “But I think the whole thing, dealing with all we dealt with, and how I was after she died … even before I got home from the hospital, he wanted to take all the pictures down, all the covers on the wall. I still have her shoes in the closet. I couldn’t let go and he wanted me to let go. It bothered him that I was as upset as I was. He came back later.”
Gia’s father called Rochelle before the show to let her know it would be on. “I had run into him in the casino before that,” she recalled. “He just gave me a big hug and a kiss and he started crying. He knew Kathleen. He knew she’d do anything to get on TV. She wanted to be the model, the superstar. So now she was doing it through Gia’s death. He used to kind of laugh at her. Like a joke. A
bad
joke.”
In August of 1988, Joe Carangi suddenly took ill and was rushed to an Atlantic City hospital for emergency surgery.
He was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor and died several weeks later. His son Michael briefly tried to take over his last remaining luncheonette, Joe’s Place. But family squabbles between the children of Joe’s three marriages soon made such a smooth generational transition impossible. When Joe’s Place finally closed, two framed magazine photos of Gia were still displayed on a shelf above the grill.
In March of 1989, the
Chicago Tribune
reported on the latest good fortune that had accrued to twenty-two-year-old local hero Cindy Crawford, the former Northwestern University student who had become a New York-based supermodel with the Elite agency. Crawford was negotiating a potentially lucrative contract with Revlon to appear in print and broadcast ads, packaging, display and sales materials for all the company’s cosmetics, fragrance, haircare, beauty treatment and suntan products. She would have to work for Revlon only twenty days a year for three years—at a base annual fee that would later be reported at $600,000. Her first ads would appear in the fall, just after the July release of the first Cindy Crawford calendar.
The Revlon contract was smaller than the one Paulina Porizkova had recently signed to represent all the various products produced under the Estée Lauder name—reportedly valued at $5 to $6 million. But it increased interest in Crawford, who had already done over 200 magazine covers worldwide in three years and had further seeped into the public consciousness when the pop star Prince included a lusting song about her, “Cindy C,” on his never-released and ardently bootlegged
Black Album.
As her first Revlon ads began to appear in September of 1989—and she started hosting a show called
House of Style
on MTV—Crawford finally crossed the line between supermodel and celebrity. Her romantic link with movie star Richard Gere, who she would later marry, cemented her position in the gossip-column world as a name that readers were already supposed to know.
Crawford had grown up in De Kalb, Illinois, the middle child of an electrician and a housewife, who separated when she was a freshman in high school and later divorced. Her
first modeling job, at sixteen, was a 1982 bra ad for the Marshall Field’s department store. The next year, the small local agency that represented her became the Chicago office of Elite. When Crawford graduated from high school, she was sent to Europe, where she worked the
alta moda
in Rome—Patrick Demarchelier, shooting for Italian
Vogue,
made her cut her hair and dye it—and did a few sittings in Paris. From there, British
Vogue
sent her to Bermuda. And from Bermuda, she returned directly to Chicago and promptly quit the business before anyone could lop off the prominent mole next to her mouth. An excellent student, she enrolled in college as a chemical engineering major. But she soon came under the tutelage of Victor Skrebneski, who was still Chicago’s only nationally important fashion photographer, just as he was when he discovered Wilhelmina Cooper in the 1950s. Crawford dropped out of college after a semester, and for two years she made a six-figure income modeling in Chicago. Her mole was reborn as a beauty mark.
Crawford was brought to New York by Elite’s Monique Pillard in 1986. She quickly became the epitome of what modeling had grown into—coldly sexual, calculating, businesslike, any pretensions to art dismissed, any discussions of being a muse rendered amusing. Perhaps modeling had always been this way. But now the
models
knew it, too.
In one of her earliest national magazine interviews, for
GQ
in 1988, Crawford had attributed her success to Paulina’s “paving the way for girls with tits.” That wasn’t really the case at all. But it was always prudent to backslap someone who was still working and visible and higher up than you on the food chain. And it was always safe to assume that the business, like the public it served, had a collective memory that reached back only one or two monthly magazines. That was especially true by the late eighties, when greed and AIDS and the War on Drugs had rendered unfashionable everything that had ever seemed delightfully out of control about the Uncommon Era of the late seventies. Nostalgia was “Out.” Amnesia was “In.” If no one was going to forgive, it was probably best to forget.
On October 30, 1989,
New York
magazine did a cover story on Crawford, anointing her as “The Face” and describing
her as “a model for the nineties.” She was described by the magazine as “an intelligent, olive-skinned, brown-eyed brunette with a full-blown figure … cast as Everywoman precisely because she is so unlike the thin, white-bread blondes who once dominated modeling.”
This time, when asked about her early years in the business, Crawford did the politically incorrect thing and told what the
fashionistas
knew was the truth.
For years, she had been sold on her resemblance to another model, whose time had passed too quickly but whose look was still very much in demand. The makeup artists sometimes even did her face to look exactly like her visual prototype.
That’s why Crawford had a nickname in the business. They called her Baby Gia.
“But more wholesome,” Crawford was quick to point out. “She was wild. Completely opposite me. She’d leave a booking in the clothes to buy cigarettes and not come back for hours.”
And then she paused: “She’s not living anymore.” It was an epitaph no more revealing than the “Beloved Daughter” etched on Gia’s headstone.
A
s I put together
Thing of Beauty,
I was frequently amazed and too often stunned by the fates of the people whose paths Gia had crossed. Gia’s New York datebooks and address books—which were given to me by her mother—served as my Rosetta Stone, but they are also memory books for an erased generation. A disproportionate number of the people mentioned in the books (or their close associates) had died before I even came to this story. Before I started, photographer Bill King, model agent Zoli, designers Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Willi Smith and Patrick Kelley and hairstylist Bob Fink had all been memorialized like Perry Ellis, Way Bandy, Chris von Wangenheim and Wilhelmina Cooper before them. A good number of these deaths will someday be attributed to AIDS.
Many more people died during the course of my research. It got to the point where I started reading
The New York Times
death notices every day to see which potential sources were gone: Steve Rubell, Halston, photographer Guy Bourdin, and fashion illustrators Manning and Tony Viramontez are just a few of the people who were alive when I started and whose biographical information I ended up verifying from their obituaries.
On at least five occasions, people who had agreed to speak with me, or were considering my request, died before the interviews could take place. Gia’s father, Joe Carangi, had
agreed to an interview for the original article I did about Gia before his sudden death from a brain tumor. I spoke with photographer Ara Gallant at the beginning of my book research, and we agreed to meet the next time I was in LA, where he had relocated. When I called many months later to schedule the actual interview, Gallant was not at the Santa Monica number I had for him. I subsequently learned that Gallant had committed suicide in Las Vegas. He was supposedly depressed about returning to drug use: I’ve still never seen an obituary for him. I was trying to arrange an interview with Kesia Keeble when she died, reportedly from untreated breast cancer. (Since her husband, fashion writer John Duka, had died of AIDS, there was much initial speculation that she had it as well.)
Keith Gentile, a Philly friend of Gia’s who gave me a great interview and led me to several key sources, died of AIDS several months after I met him. When we spoke, he apparently didn’t know he was even sick. Another good friend of Gia’s, referred to in the book by the pseudonym Vicky, died in a car crash on the way to Atlantic City during the winter of 1989, just as Gia’s aunt Barbara had four years earlier. Rochelle had called Vicky only a few weeks before the accident to convince her to speak with me.
When I tried to contact Wilhelmina executive Karen Hilton, I found out she was in a coma from a crippling stroke, from which I understand she is now slowly recovering.
And, finally, as of this writing, Rochelle Rosen* is battling liver cancer. When I did the interviews for this book, she was still living and working at the Jersey Shore; she had a new long-term lover and her biggest health concerns had been alleviated by consistently negative HIV tests. She has now moved back in with her parents and is receiving aggressive medical treatment.
About those people mentioned in the book who are still alive and whose whereabouts are knowable, I can report the following:
Kathleen and Henry Sperr still live in the Philadelphia suburbs with Kathleen’s teenage granddaughter from her son Joey’s first marriage.
Nancy Adams still lives and works at the Jersey Shore.
Michael Carangi lived and worked at the Jersey Shore until marrying an Australian woman who tracked him down after reading a version of my original
Philadelphia
magazine article on Gia, which was reprinted in the Australian edition of
Cosmopolitan.
They have since relocated to Australia.
Joey Carangi, his wife and three children still live at the Jersey Shore. While I was researching the book, Joey wasn’t speaking to his mother, but I understand they’re now in communication.
Dan Carangi recently took over a luncheonette in Atlantic City.
Maurice Tannenbaum, after moving to New York and working at Pierre Michel, recently set up his own small Manhattan salon and still comes to Philadelphia weekly to do his clients there.
Sharon Beverly* is a successful makeup artist, specializing in film and TV commercials, based in Los Angeles.
Karen Karuza left Philadelphia, where she owned a business that sold Catholic religious icons as collectibles, and relocated to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she teaches and, at this writing, is pregnant with her first child.
Toni O’Connor* lives and works in the Chicago area.
Joe McDevit (the former “Joey Bowie”) is a successful makeup artist, specializing in fashion photography, based in New York.
Ronnie Johnson* is a successful makeup artist shuttling between Philadelphia and New York.
Roseanne Rubino works in corporate sales at Tiffany’s in New York.
Rob Fay has remained drug-free and married a woman he met during the last year of Gia’s life. The first of their two children, a daughter, was named Jimi Gia Fay.
Cheryl Paczkoski and Dawn Phillips, both of whom have remained drug-free, live and work in the Philadelphia area.
Patty Stewart lives and works in South Jersey.
Lance Staedler is a successful freelance photographer who recently moved his base from New York to Los Angeles.
Michael Tighe, after destroying his photography career in the late seventies, spent four years living as a heroin addict. He eventually entered the tough Day-Top program in North Jersey, where he spent his twenty-seventh birthday and
achieved some notoriety when he was interviewed there by Geraldo Rivera for an ABC series on heroin use called
Chasing the Dragon.
He left the drug program early because he felt pressured by its administrators to do more public speaking and began using heroin again. “In the program, you’re talking about it, you’re thinking about it all the time,” he said. “They call it ‘shooting dope without shooting dope.’ So when you get out of the program, the first thing you want to do is shoot dope.” He went on a binge for two weeks and then stopped completely, with the moral support of his family and his best friend, actress Amanda Plummer. He is once again a successful freelance photographer, doing mostly celebrity portraits and movie posters, and based in LA.