No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (26 page)

clenched teeth. “I told
all
of you—no drugs!” I could understand why he was upset. The cream of Japanese society was on the far side of the curtain. He had a lot riding on the show.

“It was an accident,” I mumbled. I could hardly talk. “I didn’t know, Calvin. I swear to God.”

“Get her out of my sight,” he snapped.

“Don’t be such a prick, Calvin,” I slurred. “I’m here because I’m doing you a favor. I’m more famous in Japan than you’ll ever be.”

Calvin was steaming. Or maybe I was hallucinating:

That certainly looked like real steam coming out of his real ears.

“You will never work with me again, Janice,” he said, going red in the face. “You have my solemn promise on that.”

190 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Charlie Haughk took me back to my hotel. He was very sweet. I was really out of it and I didn’t want to fall asleep in the cab, so I asked him to talk to me. He told me all about living in Brooklyn, in the projects, with his mom. He told me he was a triple black belt. He told me he thought I was the hottest bitch he’d ever seen. Okay, there are nicer ways to tell a girl you like her. But hey, Charlie was a street kid. And at least he was honest.

I didn’t sleep with him on that trip. But the trip we took later that year, to China for a Bloomingdale’s shoot, was another story. One day we were taking a cab to some tourist attraction. I had my cameras with me—I was honing my skills as a photographer—when we saw a bunch of Chinese guys practicing their martial arts schtick at the edge of a city park. I told the driver to pull over. I didn’t speak Chinese, of course, but I noticed that if you say
HEE

Y A A A A A!
in a really loud voice, it generally gets their attention.

“Why don’t you go over there and show me what

you’ve got?” I told Charlie. The fact is, I didn’t believe his triple black belt stuff. Or black belt third-degree. Or whatever the hell he called it.

“Come on, Janice,” he said. “It’s not right.”

“What’s the matter?” I said. “You afraid?”

I can be such a bitch.

Charlie got out of the cab. I followed. He went over and did a little bowing and scraping and somehow, using hand signals and whatnot, the Chinese guys understood that the pretty American man in the loud Hawaiian shirt wanted to spar a little. They were delighted. Charlie took them on, one at a time, and—without hurting them—showed them (and me) what he was made of.

It made my Little Flower tingle.

I slept with Charlie for a few months. But he was too nice N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 191

to me. What good was he if he couldn’t help me with my repetition compulsion?

Back in New York, the 1980s were shaping up like one big hangover headache. Rubell and Schrager had hired Roy Cohn, one of the biggest heavyweights in town, to defend them. But it didn’t help. They were fined for tax evasion and sentenced to three and a half years in federal prison.

People talked about it for a while, but then we all seemed to move on with our lives. It bothered me. I mean, it’s not like they were my best friends or anything. But I’d known Rubell pretty well. And it just seemed so hopelessly sad. It made me feel lonely; the world felt like a colder place.

Later that year, worse news. Wilhelmina was hospitalized with lung cancer. All those goddamn cigarettes had done her in, and she was only forty years old. She had two children, twelve and five. I’d met them once or twice. I felt awful.

I told myself I was going to visit her in the hospital, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t have the courage.

Gia went. She told me she climbed into the hospital bed and held her, and that Willie assured her she’d be out of bed in no time. And then weeks later she was dead, of course.

I went to the funeral. It was a media event. It’s funny how you read about funerals in the paper the next day, and the reporters always point out how many mourners showed up, like it’s a competition or something. It was all very unsettling. All these people looking so chic in black. And all they talked about afterward was how it would affect business, and their careers, and what was going to happen to their little lives.

192 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

I wasn’t much better than they were. I couldn’t believe Willie was dead. She was the one who had validated me when I was starting out. Now she was gone. Did that mean
I
was over?

It was all so cheap. And it made me feel cheap because I was part of it.

I needed some drugs. They weren’t hard to find, in that crowd.

What was that line from
Alice in Wonderland
? Something about running twice as fast just to stay in place. Well, that’s how I felt. I felt like running.

MAKING IT?

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

In 1981, Mark Fleischman, a New York City developer, purchased Studio 54 for close to five million dollars. He didn’t want the party to stop, and who were we to argue?

So we went back, like sheep. There was something tired and forced about it, yes, and it wasn’t the same without Rubell’s vibe, and once in a while I got the sense that we were all faking it, but it was still a good party. Right?

Well, okay. Not really. But if you tell yourself you’re having fun often enough, you begin to believe it. And we
wanted
to believe.

I saw Peter Beard there one night and went by his place a few days later to say hello and ask for his professional advice. Peter Beard, you’ll recall, was the photographer who “discovered” Iman, the African warrior. He was also married, briefly, to Cheryl Tiegs. When I walked into his place that afternoon, the first thing I saw was Mike’s Suntori poster. Me, seven feet tall, sleek in that skintight yellow bathing suit.

“You know,” Peter told me, “when Cheryl first saw that poster, she ran her fingernails down the length of your entire body, like a cat, and said, ‘Peter, you take Janice off the wall or I walk.’ ”

I loved that story.

ªªªªªªªªª

POSING NEXT

TO MY HOT

LITTLE BOD IN

PETER BEARD’S

SCRAPBOOK.

“So what can I do you for?” Peter asked. It was almost noon; I was on my first glass of wine.

“I was hoping you’d take a look at some pictures I shot in China,” I told him. And I brought them out.

Peter was so impressed that I made an appointment

with the art director at Bloomingdale’s, and
he
was so impressed that they put the photographs on exhibit at their flagship store, on Lexington Avenue and 59th. I was on top of the world. Whenever I was in the neighborhood, I would go by and look at them, out there in the windows for the whole world to see, and eavesdrop on people’s conversations.

“Janice Dickinson? The model? She takes pictures, too?

I don’t believe it.”

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.
Hell, don’t hate me because I’m talented.

Some time later, I got a call from Bill Cosby’s people.

They were developing some ideas for television, they said, and Bill had been following my career with interest. He thought I had the right stuff. All I could think was,
Model,
photographer, actress. Is there anything this girl can’t do?

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 195

Cosby was staying on Fifth Avenue, at the swank

Sherry-Netherland Hotel, overlooking Central Park. I was asked to meet him for lunch, and I was so excited about my new acting career that I ran out and spent nine hundred dollars on a new outfit.

I walked into the restaurant and saw him across the room, and he stood and smiled his big Jell-O smile. He took my hand in both his hands, and thanked me for coming. Telly Savalas was with him. Don’t ask me why.

Savalas stood and shook my hand, too, and gave me that crazy look from
The Dirty Dozen.
If you don’t remember the movie, rent it. Savalas is very good in it. He’s insane.

We sat and chatted about our busy lives, enjoying that overhasty intimacy that comes with showbiz membership.

At one point I reminded Savalas that he’d been one of the judges at the Waldorf-Astoria—a lifetime ago, it seemed—

when I made my New York debut. He just grinned and

looked at me with those big eyes, like he wanted to ravage and murder me at the same time.

Then Cosby asked about my acting experience. Just getting through the day was acting, I joked, and he and Savalas found this very funny indeed. And then I told him the truth: that I had only acted once in my life, in high school, as Lady Macbeth. But when King Duncan started forgetting his lines, I was forced to turn the play into a comedy. This got a lot of laughs from the audience—and, when it ended, a standing ovation—but the drama teacher wasn’t exactly cheering.

Cosby wondered whether I could sing. “Well,” I said,

“Muddy Waters seems to think so.” And I told them the Muddy Waters story.

Both men grinned through the entire lunch. Grinned and stared and drooled. At one point I thought Savalas might ask his buddy Bill to hold me down while he had a go at 196 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

me, right there on the table. But they were both unfailingly polite. And before I left Cosby asked me to do two things for him. First he wanted me to read
An Actor Prepares,
by Stanislavski. Next, and far more important, he wondered if I would be good enough to give him my home number.

When it was time to say good-bye, he walked me across the lobby, to the door, oblivious to the ogling fans (
his
fans, alas, not mine). “You have
it,
Janice,” he said. “It,” of course, is that magnetic inner glow thing that really gifted actors are said to possess. I’ve only seen it up close twice in my life. Once was with Jack Nicholson. He had
it.
The other was with Mick Jagger. He had
it
to spare. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I spent the following day devouring
An Actor Prepares,
and beginning, unfortunately, to take myself oh-soseriously. So I was plenty prepared by the time Cosby called. He told me I should buzz Stubie Gardner, his musical supervisor. He was here in Manhattan, standing by for my call. Again he told me how beautiful I was, how powerfully I had affected him, and how much he wanted to see me again. It would have been nice to hear that under any circumstances, but in those post-Mike days all that soft soap was especially welcome.

I called Stubie and arranged to meet him the next

evening. When the time came, I found myself standing next to his piano, trying not to betray my nervousness. But when I opened my mouth to sing, I can’t honestly say the angels in heaven pulled out their little trumpets. Stubie looked up from his piano bench with one of those silly smiles glued to his face. He was horrified, and hoping against hope that his eyes wouldn’t betray him.

Just then Cosby arrived, smoking a big cigar. He

marched over and took my hand and literally bowed and kissed it. My Black Prince!

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 197

“So,” he asked Stubie, “how was she?”

“Great,” Stubie said. The silly smile remained in place.

At that moment I had a small epiphany:
This is why
there’s so much shit on TV and in the movies! Because people always lie to people in power. No one has the courage
to tell them the truth!

“I’m glad to hear that,” Cosby said. He stuck that big cigar in his mouth and licked it. I tried not to read too much into that cigar. Maybe it’s true that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Cosby turned to look at Stubie and said with great gravity: “Because I’m thinking about having her open for me in Vegas.”

An assistant poked his head inside. “Mr. Cosby,” he said. “Your wife is on the line.” Cosby looked at the assistant as if he wanted to kill him. This was no time to be bothered with the fact that he was married. He turned and took both my hands in his, smiled sweetly, said he’d call me later.

Then went off to deal with his wife.

I turned to look at Stubie. “What do you think?” I

asked.

WITH PETER

BEARD IN HIS