No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (43 page)

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

leave my hands on the steering wheel like you know to do if you live in Southern California, and I focus on the rearview mirror.
Okay, there he is. He’s getting out now.

Here he comes. Here he is
. Only it’s not a he; it’s a she.

“Can I see your driver’s license and registration,

please?” she says.

I look dead at her. She’s kind of cute. Her pants are really tight. And that big gun—the things we could do with that gun. For a moment there I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been a lesbian. But of course I’m not a lesbian. I’m a gay man.

“Did I do something wrong, officer?” I say. I’m slurring. I feel like an idiot. She tells me to step out of the car and puts me through the motions. One foot in front of the other; turn around and try it again, tip of the finger to the tip of the nose.
What nose? Oh, that nose! Why didn’t you
say so in the first place!

She drove me to the Beverly Hills jail. If you have to spend a night in jail, people, this is the place to do it. They offered me coffee and warm blankets; I think one of them was cashmere.
Did I hear someone say croissants?
The male police officers were very friendly. They kept coming by to ask me if I was sure I didn’t want to make a phone call. Yes, I told them. I was sure. Who was I going to call at this hour? Albert? How could I let him see me in this condition?

I stumbled out of jail at eight o’clock the next morning.

The first thing I saw was my old friend Esme, the model.

She’d just pulled up to a day care center directly across the street from the precinct. I thought I was hallucinating. She saw me and her jaw dropped.

“Janice?” she mumbled. I nodded.
Yeah, it’s me. In the
flesh.
She made a little motion with an upraised finger—

I’ll be right back!
—and hustled the kids along to keep

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them from witnessing this living horror. I couldn’t blame her. I had so much mascara running down my face I looked like Alice Cooper.

I didn’t wait for her to come back. I walked to the corner, where I’d been told I’d find a cab, and hopped into the first one in line.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“What difference does it make?” I said.

Two weeks later, on a Saturday night, Albert Gersten came to my house and fell to his knees and handed me a twenty-three-carat diamond ring. I said yes. The newspapers got wind of it. Everyone called, mostly to congratulate me.

“Why the fuck are you marrying that loser?” Sly said.

MY WEDDING TO ALBERT GERSTEN. LEFT TO RIGHT:

FREDERIQUE, DEBBIE, ME, ALBERT, ALEXIS,

MITCH (ALEXIS’S HUSBAND).

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

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

“Everyone’s a loser except you, right, Sly?”

“You’re making a big mistake,” he said.

“You were my last big mistake,” I said, hanging up.

Albert and I were married on Valentine’s Day, 1995, at the Gate. Karl Lagerfeld made my wedding dress. It was an old-fashioned Moulin Rouge number, scarlet red, with a corset so tight I could hardly breathe. It was just as well. If I’d been able to breathe—if a tiny bit of oxygen had been able to reach my brain—I might have had the good sense to run away.

Sly called just before the ceremony. He begged me,

again, not to go through with it. “Just say the word and I’ll land a fucking chopper on the roof right the fuck now,” he said.

“Earth to Rambo,” I said. “I’m getting married. Do you copy?”

I hung up. For a moment there, I kind of hoped he

would show up with a chopper. But after a few lines of coke and three-quarters of a bottle of champagne I decided to go through with it. I walked down the makeshift aisle in front of two thousand guests. Governor Gray Davis married us. I don’t remember much else. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Alexis and Debbie were there. And I’d invited my mother, but she couldn’t make it. She was struggling, quietly, with cancer.

Albert and I went to St. Bart’s for our honeymoon. On the first night we hooked up with a few of Albert’s friends for dinner, and drank voluminous amounts of champagne.

Albert didn’t even like champagne—tequila was his

drink—but he bought it because he enjoyed showing off.

After dinner we went to some hot club called the Parrot.

That got me thinking about Alexandra King’s parrot, the one that said
Fuck me Fuck me Fuck me
. That made me sad. Now I was thinking about my first marriage, to Ron N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 333

Levy. I wondered what had happened to him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“What’s wrong?” Albert asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Try to look a little happier,” he said.

“I’m happy,” I said. And we had a few more drinks.

When they started getting ready to close, Albert wanted to drag everyone back to the hotel, but no one was game—

thank God. The valet returned with the mini-moke, a convertible Jeep.

“I’ll drive,” I said. We were both pretty wasted, but he was in worse shape than me.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

He gave me one of his Albert Gersten shut-the-fuck-up looks. So I shut the fuck up and got in the car and he pulled out, tires squealing. It was a very curvy road. He had the brights on, but they didn’t seem very bright to me.

I couldn’t see more than fifteen or twenty yards ahead, and the road was coming fast.

“Please slow down,” I begged.

“What were you thinking about back there? Do you

regret having married me?”

“No, I do not regret having married you. But I’d like to live long enough to enjoy it.”

He gunned the engine. We were really whipping around the curves now. My mouth felt dry.

“Albert, please,” I said. But that was all I said. He lost control of the car around the next curve, and we sailed through a retaining wall and plummeted over the side.

I’m dead,
I thought.
Please God don’t let me die. I have
two kids who need me.

We were moving awfully fast, crashing over rocks and through brush and small trees. I could hear glass shattering and one of the tires blowing—loud as a gunshot—and then 334 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

the windshield popped and everything went dark. When I came to, not long afterward, we were still upright, with the right front side of the car a few feet off the ground and the right tire audibly spinning. I could smell gasoline.

I should have seen it coming. Third time to the altar, and I can’t even get out of the honeymoon without a car wreck.

Story of my life.

“Albert?” I said. He was moaning. I looked over at him.

His face was covered in blood. “Albert, are you okay?” He didn’t answer. I popped my seatbelt. I wiggled my toes. It was probably a silly thing to do, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t paralyzed. I opened my door and got out and went around to Albert’s side and opened his door. “Can you walk?” I asked. He just moaned. I reached in and removed his seatbelt and dragged him out of the car. He was useless.

He tried to walk up the pitched hill, with me half-carrying him, but we still had to stop and rest every thirty seconds.

Finally, exhausted, we reached the side of the road. It was deathly still. I looked over at Albert’s face. He looked awful. He seemed to be in shock. “You’re fine,” I said.

“You’re going to be fine.”

I heard the distant whine of a motorcycle and got to my feet and stood in the middle of the road. I waved my arms, and the motorcycle slowed down and stopped. The driver cut the engine. He looked wide-eyed and frightened.

“Please get help,” I said. “My husband is badly hurt.” He raced off. I went back to the side of the road and sat beside Albert and held him in my arms and tried to comfort him. I think I fell asleep for a while. The sirens woke me. I could barely keep my eyes open en route to the hospital, but all the way there I held Albert’s hand. “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.”

It took a hundred stitches to patch him together, and when the doctors were done he looked a little bit like

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 335

Frankenstein. Then again, as the doctors pointed out, we were both lucky to be alive.

We stayed in St. Bart’s till Albert was well enough to fly. When we finally got back to L.A., Albert sat around for a week, staring at the walls and feeling sorry for himself.

But then he couldn’t take it anymore. He started going out to the club and drinking again, showing off his scars like some returning goddamn war hero.

But I didn’t go to the clubs with him anymore. I was tired of that scene. Instead, I stayed at his place in Malibu, with Savannah and the nanny, and tried not to think of the mess I’d made of my life. I tried not to think about the failed marriages and the abortions and the ongoing battles with Simon, who was determined to punish me by asking the courts to grant him sole custody of Nathan. Of course, IN PARIS.

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

it all gnawed away at me no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, but there’s nothing like a few drinks and bad sitcoms to ease the pain. You feel so much better about yourself as the liquor warms your belly and works its way toward the extremities. And everything on TV sounds so wonderfully witty when you’re drunk. I giggled myself into exhaustion, drank and giggled my way to sleep.

Late one night, when I was watching Letterman, the

phone rang. It was Debbie, calling to tell me that Mom had just passed away. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Debbie got pissed and hung up. I sat there, numb, until I heard cars pulling up outside. Albert was home. He’d brought a bunch of hangers-on from the

club—something he did almost every night.

“My mother died,” I said.

“Gee,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey.” Then he went to get the door and let his friends in. They went off to the den to drink.

I flew down for the funeral two days later and flew back that same night. There was nothing for me in Hollywood, Florida, anymore. And it occurs to me now, as I say that, that there had never been anything for me there. Albert didn’t come. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me on the kitchen table. It was already open. It was from Stephanie Seymour: an engraved invitation to her bridal shower in Paris. She was about to marry Peter Brandt, a successful entrepreneur. Axl was history, of course. But we all had a little history, right?

“I think we should go,” Albert said. He must have been feeling guilty. “We’ll go and have a good time.”

I thought about Stephanie and all the others. Friendship is strange, especially in this line of work. You meet on a shoot—for the first time—and you tell each other

absolutely everything about your lives. No detail is too N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 337

intimate. But then the shoot’s over and you go back to your lives, as if you’d shared nothing, nothing at all, and find yourself feeling more alone than ever. I felt horribly alone at that moment. I missed the girls; I missed the sisterhood; I missed modeling. . . .

So we went to Paris. And we tried to have fun. We went to restaurants and clubs and I drank too much and I did too many drugs. Finally, it was time for Stephanie’s party. I left Albert to his own devices and took a cab to the Bristol Hotel. Donatella Versace and Naomi Campbell, the hosts, had booked the penthouse suite, with its huge deck and lush gardens. Claudia Schiffer and Shalom Harlow and Amber Valetta were there. Donatella and Naomi made little speeches, and there were jokes about second marriages.

Stephanie opened her gifts. We kept oohing and aahing over them. Sexy lingerie. Purses. A necklace or two.

Stephanie began to cry. “I’m going to make it work this time,” she said. “I need this to work. I really love this guy.

It’s not like last time.”

We went to the Barfly afterward. We piled out of the limo—one girl more beautiful than the next—and into the nightclub. Heads snapped round: The men must have