No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (20 page)

Ricardo drove me to the airport for my flight back to Rome. I was relieved and happy. “I wish Versace wasn’t gay,” I told Ricardo. And I did; he was the perfect man.

A few days later, Mike—the not-so-perfect man—came to visit me in Rome. He missed me, he said. And, unlike Ron, he was willing and able to do something about it.

But the minute he landed, we were fighting. We fought about everything. About who got what side of the bed.

About where we were going for dinner. About the clothes I wore. Even about money, though we were both rolling in it.

Most of all, we fought because Mike was pathologically jealous. It seemed there was nothing I could say or do to convince him that I was faithful, that I was his, that I was a one-man woman. In addition, he couldn’t handle all the attention I was getting. And that first night he was in town I was getting plenty of attention, more even than I’d bargained for . . .

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

I was doing Valentino’s haute couture show. It was held outdoors, at the base of the famous stairs outside the Colosseum. A huge tent had been erected off to one side, a few yards from the runway. I’d already made the trip up and down that goddamn runway two dozen times, and I was dog-tired. It was getting late; we were near the end of the show. Valentino came over to make sure I looked perfect. He was tall and rail thin and deeply tanned; every last hair on his head was glued into place, stiff as a helmet.

“You look marvelous, darling,” he said.

I reached for another Baccarat flute of champagne and finished it off in a gulp. “VaVa,” I said. “This dress is too tight. I can’t breathe.”

“Breathing is for amateurs,” he said.

I had another glass of champagne and braced myself, and when my turn came I stepped out onto the runway and wowed the crowd. It felt great to be loved. I was blowing kisses, puckering up for the photographers. I saw Mike scowling at me from the third row, but resisted the urge to give him the finger. Then I reached the end of the runway and it wasn’t there.
Gone
—just like that. And for a brief moment I found myself sailing through the air—held aloft, no doubt, by the bubbles in the champagne—only to crash into the lap of the great Sophia Loren.

The paparazzi went nuts. They trampled each other to get at us.

“Oh, Miss Loren,” I said, all safe and warm on her lap, nestled in her celebrated bosom. “I am so so sorry.”

She was sitting with Marcello Mastroianni and now

turned to look at him as if to say,
Do something.
And he did. He stood and helped me to my feet—flashbulbs

exploding all around us—then bent low and kissed my hand. The crowd went wild. Marcello took a bow and

smiled. He raised my hand—a victory salute—and helped N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 145

me back onto the runway. I curtsied, much to everyone’s delight, then turned to go on my merry way. But Marcello wasn’t done with me yet: He smacked me on the ass, hard, and the crowd roared with laughter. So did I, to be honest. I roared all the way back to the tent.

“Ay Jan
eece!”
VaVa moaned. “You’re something else!”

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. By midafternoon, my hotel room was overflowing with congratulatory cards and flowers.

“Can you get rid of some of these fucking flowers?”

Mike groused. It was later that night; we were dressing for dinner. “I feel like I’m at a fucking funeral.”

“Not
m y
funeral,” I said.

We had a peaceful enough

stroll to the restaurant, but we’d

barely ordered when Mike

began giving me shit about

Pierre Houles, one of the photographers I’d been working with. Pierre was another

French wiseguy; he also happened to be one of Mike’s best friends. He was very

cool, a sort of European

Photograph not available for

cowboy, and I was so sick

electronic edition

of Mike’s jealous badgering that I started playing

into it.

SHOT BY MIKE REINHARDT

AT BREAKFAST. WE

LOVED TO READ THE

NEWSPAPER TOGETHER.

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

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

“Well, you know, Mike, you’re good, but you’re no

Houles.”

“What the fuck does
that
mean?” he snapped, raising his voice. People at the neighboring tables turned to watch.

The Italians love good drama.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “You think I’m sleeping with him?”

“Are you?”

“Fuck this!” I said. “I don’t have to put up with your ridiculous insecurity.” I threw my napkin down and

stormed out.

I ran across the Piazza della Repubblica to the fountain by the Grand Hotel, feeling pissed off and belittled as I always did after a blowout with Mike. It was ninety degrees that July night in Rome; I grabbed my blouse in a frenzy of overheated anger, and it ripped. That got me so pissed that I started ripping off the rest of my clothes, and before I knew it I’d jumped into the fountain, butt-naked.

Traffic stopped. I was mooning people and screaming at Mike and he was screaming at me and horns were blaring and the Italian men were cheering. A couple of guys tried to jump into the fountain with me. Fights broke out. The police came. A bellman ran over from the hotel with a big fluffy bathrobe for me and the police hustled us out of there and started traffic moving again.

I went back in our hotel room, and found Mike there.

He pulled off my robe and fucked me.

“Is this love?” I asked him when it was over. (And it was over
fast.
)

“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

He was asking the wrong girl. I didn’t know what love was. There were times when I thought I was using Mike to be mean to me. Does that make any sense?
Meanness.
It’s N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 147

what I knew. It was familiar. And they say we’re attracted to the familiar.

Still, I tried not to analyze it too deeply. Spend your life trying not to think about something, and eventually you discover you’re afraid to start. So we’d fight and fuck and fight, and we called it love. And there were times when it felt like the best thing in the world.

In fact, when we got back to New York, there were

moments of genuine domestic bliss. We’d sit home Saturday nights. Cook together. Lie in the tub in the candlelight, glowing with good feeling. We’d watch
Saturday Night
Live
and fall asleep in each other’s arms, like a pair of newlyweds who were finally taking a much-needed break from sex. But it didn’t escape Mike when our ardor began to wane.

“There’s an old joke,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“There are three stages of sex in married life,” he began.

“The first is Household Sex. That’s where you fuck in every room in the house, in every imaginable position. The second is Bedroom Sex, which is where you fuck in the bedroom, but with less and less frequency and less and less enthusiasm . . . ”

“And the third?”

“The third stage is Hallway Sex. That’s where you pass each other in the hallway and say, ‘Fuck you!’ ”

It was a pretty funny joke unless you thought about it. If you thought about it, it was pretty sad. It was sad because it was the goddamn truth. All that jealousy from Mike, and he was the one doing the cheating. I knew it. He traveled constantly, and every time he came back there would be whispered phone calls and odd charges on his credit card and this look about him like he’d been a bad little boy. He 148 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

denied it, of course. Told me I was crazy. Told
everyone
I was crazy. And I accepted his denials because I wanted to believe he was faithful.

It’s true what they say. We believe what we want to believe.

MODEL WARS

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

In the spring of 1977, with the snow gone and New York City awash in April sunshine, the business started growing cloudy. The turmoil was about money. But then it’s always about money, isn’t it? Money and sex . . .

The thing is, some people were getting very, very

rich. Halston was already in the stratosphere, but photographers like Avedon were now demanding—and getting—

million-dollar contracts. That was a lot of cash in those days. Photographers began to grumble—
Who the fuck is
Avedon? I’m better than Avedon!
—and hot on their heels were the models, some of whom were making upwards of $100,000 a year. Not me, of course. I was still too different. I wasn’t as black as Beverly or as white as Cheryl—a couple of Cover Girls who were really raking in the dough.

And I was a little too ethnic, a little too sexual, a little too threatening—unlike, say, Lauren Hutton, who had a juicy contract with Revlon.

So, yeah—I found it hard to listen to their endless whining. Most of these girls had never dreamed of that kind of wealth—half of them were trailer trash—but suddenly a hundred grand wasn’t enough.

I would have killed for a hundred grand. I had to
work
for my money. Sure, I traveled all over the world, and I was treated like visiting royalty. Flowers, limos, champagne, 150 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

caviar. But America wasn’t exactly embracing me. In fact, there was this nasty little man at Conde Nast—the publishing empire responsible for
Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair,
and countless other magazines—who downright hated me.

He told a client that my eyes weren’t the “right shape,” that they wouldn’t sell product. Plus I was just too sexual, not sweet and approachable and girl-next-doorish like Cheryl.

Maybe he was right; maybe I had the kind of look that would have offended or threatened American sensibilities.

And maybe the stuff I was doing in Europe
was
too provocative . . . Me, stark naked, arms and hands strategically placed over my tits and crotch. On a beach in the Bahamas, with my nipples at attention. Wading through a piranha-infested swamp in the African bush, looking like I’d just been laid—by an entire village . . . But right or wrong didn’t matter: He was a powerful little man, and he hurt me—personally and professionally.

It was also hard to listen to the whiny photographers.

Everyone wanted what Halston and Avedon were getting: juicy contracts, security, and long-term commitments.

“We should be getting residuals for our pictures,” Mike said one night. We were having a few friends over for dinner, all of them in the business. “Why the hell are the magazines entitled to use my images over and over again without paying for them? Why am I giving up the rights to my work?”

We’d all started at the bottom. We’d paid our dues. Now it was time to start getting what was coming to us. And of course things did begin to change. Nowadays, photographers own the rights to their photographs; they get paid every time the image is reprinted. And some of the big names—Herb Ritts, Patrick Demarchelier, Steve Meisel, Bruce Weber—command fees of $100,000 a
day.

Of course, real geniuses think beyond day rates. Hal

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 151

ston, for example, was one of the first people in fashion to get into licensing. He would put his name on perfumes, cars, luggage, bath towels, sunglasses—you name it. Then he would sit back and watch the checks roll in. People hated him for it. What’s that old line? “Every time one of my friends succeeds, I die a little.”

That same month, while people were still being appropriately catty about Avedon and Halston, Studio 54 opened its doors. Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell had long dreamed of creating a nightclub for Beautiful People, and here it was. We loved it. We were those people. The club was for
us.
You walked through the front doors and immediately felt like you’d arrived, like you
belonged.
There were other clubs, yes—but they were nothing like Studio. I can’t even remember their names. Studio, hell—I’ll never forget it.

They threw their first major party the following month.

It was Bianca Jagger’s birthday. Halston was the host.

Bianca made a grand entrance atop a white horse, led through the club by a huge black guy who was wearing nothing but gold glitter.
Are we getting your attention, people?
Everyone was dying to get into Studio. Everyone wanted to be beautiful, to rub shoulders with the beautiful.

But few are chosen. Tough shit.

I loved it. I had worked hard to get where I’d gotten and part of the fun was being recognized for it, going out and partying and having Steve Rubell tell you how great you looked, and
Would you like to step into my office, sweetheart?

Mike, on the other hand—he hated it. Mike was into the temple of his body. If I stopped in for a quick drink without him, which I did from time to time, he’d find a way to punish me for it.

“You’re falling apart,” he said one night.

I had just walked in. I guess he smelled the cognac on 152 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

my breath. He had just finished meditating and giving himself a fucking colonic or something—he was turning into a monk—and he couldn’t help himself.

“So who were you with? Stephanie? Andie? Iman. Was

Truman there?”

Mike found the place repellent. It was loud and stank of sex and amyl nitrate, and everywhere you turned people were fucking like animals, but with less shame and less self-consciousness than street dogs. I was put off by that part of it, too, to be honest, but I loved the energy and the deafening music and the writhing bodies on the dance floor and the feeling that we were oh-so-special.

“I stopped in for one lousy drink, Mike. Is that a crime?”

“
One
drink? I don’t think so, Janice. You’re drunk. Keep it up. Your ass is starting to sag.”

“Really?” I said. “I must be in horrible shape.
Sports
Illustrated
called today. They want me for the swimsuit issue.”

“The
swimsuit
issue!?” He was stunned.

“Yes,” I said.

Mike rubbed his chinny-chin-chin, lost in thought, then made up his mind. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll let you do it. But I want you to call Julie Campbell”—the photo editor—“and tell her
I’m
shooting you. No one else.”