Thing of Beauty (2 page)

Hoving then takes the viewer through the cattle-call auditions and explains that there are 7,000 girls in New York who “call themselves models”; 1,500 actually work, and of these, 500 are the “so-called ‘glamour guns’” who get most of the good jobs. Because his report is focused on New York, he doesn’t even mention the international farm system for modeling: the untold thousands of girls enrolled in regional schools, or signed up at local agencies in America and Europe.

Several models attest to how difficult and degrading the grind of traveling and groveling for work can become. Shaggy-haired John Casablancas—the president of Elite, the upstart agency that has recently toppled the decades-old studio system in modeling and, almost overnight, tripled the price of professional prettiness—explains that when and if success finally comes, models “have a moment where they appreciate it very, very much, but it’s very, very short … they get too much too quickly.”

Then the camera cuts to Francesco Scavullo’s studio on East Sixty-third Street. In the reception area, decades of
Cosmopolitan, Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
covers shot by the precious, prolific photographer hang high on the white walls. The girl whose face and “bosom”—as Scavullo would say—appear on some of his more recent covers is in the small dressing room being prepared for a demonstration photo session being staged for the TV cameras. Seated in front of a large makeup mirror, the girl doesn’t squirm a bit
as her face is painstakingly primed, painted and powdered for nearly two hours. She has learned to hold still while her naturally beautiful face and hair are made unnaturally beautiful so that the camera—which sees things somewhat differently than the human eye—will capture her as preternaturally beautiful.

She is Gia. At seventeen, she was a pretty girl from the Northeast section of Philadelphia who worked the counter at her father’s luncheonette, Hoagie City, and never missed a David Bowie concert. At eighteen, she was one of the most promising new faces and figures in modeling, discovered by the agency run by sixties cover girl Wilhelmina Cooper and launched in American
Vogue
by the most influential fashion photographer of the day, Arthur Elgort. Now, at twenty-two, Gia is a member of the elite group of so-called top models. At any given moment, there are only a dozen or two such girls, who end up splitting most of the very best editorial, advertising and catalog jobs.

Even among the professionally beautiful, Gia is considered special. She is more like the quintessential painter’s model—an inspiration, a “thing of beauty”—than a working girl, a professional mannequin. A disproportionate number of the beauty and fashion shots she appears in transcend the accepted level of artful commerce and approach the realm of actual photographic art.

But Gia is legendary in her industry for other reasons, only a few of which can even be mentioned on network television. Her celebrated androgyny is no provocative put-on: the female makeup artist who is brushing Gia’s lips shiny red is the recurring object of her affections. Her rebellious attitude toward the business—no model has ever come so far while appearing to care so little—has alternately outraged and delighted the biggest names in fashion. And her drug problems have been so acute that if she didn’t have that incredible
look
, she might never work at all: lesser girls have been blackballed for doing once what Gia has managed to get away with many times.

Behind the scenes, where the world of a fashion model is
really
not always as it appears, Gia has given new meaning to the industry catchphrase “girl of the moment.” It usually just refers to a model’s popularity among photographers, art
directors and ad agencies reaching such a critical mass that her face is suddenly everywhere. But Gia is such a girl of her moment that she is about to become either the face of the eighties, or a poster child for the social ills of the seventies.

While Gia is being photographed by Scavullo in the background—“Great, like that, turn your head over a bit fabulous, fabulous, laugh,
laugh;
beautiful, marvelous … smile, if you can smile”—reporter Hoving talks about the supermodel. “A virtual symbol of the bright side and the dark side of modeling,” he calls her.

“I started working with very good people … I mean all the time, very fast,” Gia says, in a metered tone created by professional voice instructors who are trying to neutralize her unsophisticated Philadelphia accent so she might get into acting. “I didn’t build into a model. I just sort of became one.”

“Then the troubles began for Gia,” Hoving intones, his post-recorded commentary interspersed with edited interview snippets. “The real world became clouded by illusions.”

“When you’re young,” Gia tries to explain, “you don’t always … y’know … it’s hard to make [out] the difference between what is real and what is not real.”

“Particularly when adulated …”

“Innocent,” she corrects, “and there’s a lot of vultures around you.”

“She became erratic,” Hoving booms on, “failed to show up for jobs.” Then he turns to Gia. “At one point, you got kind of into the drug scene, didn’t you?”

“Ummm,” she pauses for a long time, as the reporter and cameraman anxiously wait to see if the loaded question will yield a usable sound bite about a still-taboo subject. Gia has been in front of the camera enough times to know how to dodge the question or spoil the take but, finally, she decides to do neither. “Yes, you could say that I did. It kind of creeps up on you and catches you in a world that’s, y’know, none that anyone will ever know except someone that has been there.”

“You’re free of it, aren’t you, now?” he asks, even though many on the
20/20
crew believe her to be high on something as she speaks.

“Oh yes, I am, definitely,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here right now talking to you if I wasn’t, I don’t think.”

“Are you happy with your success?”

Gia thinks for a second, running her tongue across her painted lips. “Ummm, yes,” she says. “I am, I am.”

“You … hesitated.”

“Well, I just wanted to
think
about it,” she quips back, laughing, trying to defuse whatever poignancy her pause has taken on, now that it has been captured on film and can be offered for individual interpretation to each of the program’s fourteen million viewers.

“No, I am happy with it,” she says.

“Didja ever do it for money?” asked the tall, haggard young woman, not even bothering to brush away the long hair that covered her red eyes and broken-out cheeks.

“Do what?” asked the nurse, a big-boned woman who sat crosslegged and shoeless at the opposite end of the bed—a posture she found put the more depressed patients at ease.

“Y’know, sex. Ever do it for money?”

“No, of course not. Why?”

“I have,” said the woman, lighting a Marlboro. “I’ve turned a lotta tricks. For drugs, y’know. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

The nurse guessed that the patient was just trying to shake her up, throw her off guard. But she didn’t doubt the truth of the statement. The young woman’s body had been violated in half a dozen different ways. She had been addicted to heroin for a long time and had attempted suicide with a massive overdose only weeks before. The bruises on her upper body suggested that she had been badly beaten up. She had recently been raped. And she was suffering the effects of exposure from sleeping outside in the rain several nights before.

The young woman had no visible means of support. She had registered as a welfare patient in the emergency room of this small, suburban hospital outside of Philadelphia. There was a mother who came to visit sometimes, but otherwise the girl seemed very much alone. Only twenty-six, she was one of the youngest street people the hospital had ever
admitted. Turning tricks was probably the only way she could survive.

The nurse was encouraged that the young woman wanted to talk about anything. “Carangi, G.” had been severely depressed and mostly uncommunicative during her stay. She had first been admitted to the medical wing for treatment of pneumonia and low white-blood-cell count. When blood tests revealed that she was HIV-positive, she was placed in an isolation ward and treated gingerly, if at all, by hospital personnel largely uninformed about the disease. Even though it was already the summer of 1986 and health care workers were supposed to know better, unfamiliarity was still breeding contempt. Some nurses and orderlies were donning rubber gloves or “space suits” before entering her room, and they were wiping down her phone every time she used it, which only exacerbated her depression and suicidal feelings.

When the patient’s medical condition stabilized, she was put on lithium and shifted to the mental health wing. There, it was hoped she could get a handle on her depression and figure out where she would go after discharge. “The stepfather”—mental health professionals had a way of referring to the people in a patient’s life in the distant third person, as if each was an interchangeable actor taking a role in a little play—had refused to let her come back home. And the mother, who some hospital personnel had already grown to dislike because she was “difficult,” insisted that she had no choice but to acquiesce to his wishes.

It was a pretty bleak case history that filled the files of Med. Rec. #04-34-10, not many positives to reinforce. So, if turning tricks for drugs was a topic that this extraordinary patient wanted to talk about, it was better than not talking at all. Or crying, which was how she had been spending many of her days.

So she and the nurse talked about turning tricks. They talked about junkie life: the shooting galleries, the filth, the sprawled-out bodies. They talked about different types of heroin and how many bags the young woman usually shot.

“You married? D’ya have any kids?” the patient later asked, trying to turn the conversation away from herself.

The nurse explained that she had a beautiful little daughter—so
beautiful, in fact, that one day they were walking through one of the casinos in Atlantic City and a photographer asked if he could take the little girl’s picture. The shot appeared on the cover of a casino magazine. After that, the nurse explained, she began driving her six-year-old to New York on weekends to auditions for modeling jobs. It had been very exciting for both of them, but the daughter got few jobs and the travel expenses had piled up. After a year, they had stopped going to auditions altogether. But her daughter was begging her to resume the trips.

“Don’t do it,” the patient said. “Even if she wants it, don’t let her do it. I used to be a model. You don’t want your kid to be a model.”

T
he 1970s came early for Gia Marie Carangi. Many people would later recall 1973, the year the Vietnam War ended and the Supreme Court made abortion legal, as the official start of what they remembered as “the seventies”: that slice of time when the social changes people talked about in the sixties actually started happening, when sexual liberation and drug experimentation left the rarefied laboratory of the college campus and, in the hands of regular parents and regular kids, mutated into something else entirely. Some would recall 1974 as the benchmark, the year one group of investigative journalists dethroned a U.S. president and another group created
People
magazine. Others would say the decade didn’t officially start until 1975, the year TV spawned
Saturday Night Live
, New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, mass marketing was reinvented by “designers” and America started to realize that freedom really
was
just another word for nothing left to lose.

But for Gia, the seventies began earlier, in February of 1971, when she had just turned eleven and trends like free love and women’s liberation showed up on her doorstep at 4027 Fitler Street: one of the nicest single-family homes in one of the nicest pockets of Northeast Philadelphia. The seventies began the night that the regular evening argument between her parents—Joseph and Kathleen Carangi, a chronically overworked restaurateur and his forever dissatisfied
second wife—ended with Gia’s mother leaving the house for good, without really even saying good-bye.

The departure was the talk of the neighborhood. Even in the rising tide of separations and divorces, a mother leaving her husband
and her children
was unusual. And the two clans brought together by this marriage had become somewhat
known
because so many of them lived in the Northeast and had, at one time or another, worked in one of the family’s restaurants. Joe Carangi had built a little culinary empire for himself. A second-generation Italian Catholic, whose father had run a jewelry business under the de-ethnicized name Crane, Joe had returned from World War II and started out in the food business delivering Bond bread. With his fraternal twin brother Dan in tow, Joe had then parlayed a series of local luncheonettes into, first, a respectable restaurant and a poolroom and, later, a lucrative chain of sandwich shops, each named Hoagie City, after the Philadelphia version of the submarine. A small jocular man with thinning dark hair, he took his family on nice vacations and gave his wife and children nice things, but mostly what he did was work. He was out early in the morning to catch the breakfast trade and home late in the evening after all the transitory employees the restaurant business attracted had finished their tasks.

Joe Carangi’s first marriage had ended in divorce, he always said, because he was “too young.” And he had no intention of making the same mistake twice and having his attentions diverted from financially supporting his family. Instead, he made a
different
mistake. He married a twenty-one-year-old neighborhood girl—eleven years his junior—who wanted not only his success and stability but his constant understanding and attention, neither of which he was able to give. She also wanted his help in raising the children and keeping the house straight, neither of which he felt was part of his job description.

Kathleen Adams Carangi was the second of five daughters born to an Irish Navy machinist and his Welsh, farm-bred, fundamentalist housewife. The Adams family had relocated to the Northeast from a farm in Maryland when Kathleen was six, after their only son died in infancy. At a young age, Kathleen had rejected her mother’s strict beliefs. What
Kathleen came to believe in was glamour. She believed in beauty, too, but beauty was something she hadn’t really been born with: she was a chubby, big-boned teenager with thick glasses. Glamour, however, was something she knew she could work at, develop and, with enough money, simply buy. Beauty was truth but glamour was a way to do something
about
the truth. It was a way for a woman to cast an alluring spell using powders and creams and incantations from fashion magazine headlines. Glamorous things made a woman feel the way a woman was supposed to feel; they were the wages of the job of being female. And as Kathleen Adams was proud to say, “I always thoroughly enjoyed being a woman.”