No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (21 page)

The next day I called Julie Campbell and told her Mike wanted to shoot me. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “We’ll pass.” She wasn’t going to let Mike take over her shoot. He was a control freak in a world of control freaks. It wasn’t all that dissimilar from the film industry. The director—or, in fashion, the photographer—thinks he’s God. And everyone from the clients to the producers to the lowly models had to kneel before God. Julie was not a kneeler. She was going to run her own show.

So of course I lost the gig. And I was way pissed. I called N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 153

Iman, and we met for drinks at Trader Vic’s, in the Plaza Hotel. I loved Iman. We went all the way back to the Wilhelmina days, and I thought she was one of the most ravishing creatures on the face of the planet. She’d been discovered by Peter Beard, who was a genuinely great photographer. But the stories about her were genuinely bullshit.

I mean, Beard told everyone he’d found her in the African bush, and suddenly reporters were describing her as this Somali tribeswoman, part of a fierce nomadic family. The truth is, they met in Nairobi, on a dirty, noisy city street filled with tourists. And Iman’s father was a respected gynecologist, not a fucking warrior.

Iman had a great sense of humor. She had this attitude that you should never correct anything anyone says about you, good or bad. I thought it was a great attitude. And she was a great storyteller. She was madly in love with her husband, Spencer Haywood, the legendary basketball player.

Life! It gets so fucking complicated. Here she was going on about her great husband, and I’m whining about Mike.

He was running my life, and
ruining
it, but somehow I couldn’t break free. He had a sick hold on me, like my father. He was handsome and smart and talented and successful and multilingual. I was dumb. I was lucky he wanted me, right? Even when he screamed at me and

called me stupid and went off and cheated on me. No, not right;
wrong.
But I guess I was hooked, because every time I felt myself thinking about trying to end it, it was like he sensed it. He’d have roses waiting for me when I walked through the door. Or I’d come home from work, exhausted, and he’d be in the kitchen shucking oysters. Naked.

The thing is, even when the work was going well, I

needed a man to tell me I was great and good and wonderful and beautiful and amazing. I believed in myself, yes; but there was a limit to what I believed. Deep down, I 154 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

couldn’t drown out the rat bastard’s voice:
You’ll never
amount to anything. You’ll never amount to anything.

You’ll never amount to anything.
Sometimes I felt like a split personality, caroming between extremes of self-confidence and crippling insecurity. I wondered if everyone was like that. I
hoped
everyone was like that.

But who had time for introspection? The next thing I knew, John Casablancas came to town. For many years, he’d been running Elite as a European associate for Eileen Ford and Wilhelmina, in a friendly, noncompetitive way, much as they worked with Christa. But suddenly he wasn’t feeling friendly anymore. (Money again! The business was making people filthy rich.) He decided to open his own office in New York. He promised the girls fatter paychecks, reduced commissions, and plenty of
fun.
He knew how to seduce women. Limos, dinner, roses, caviar, diamonds. He told each of them—me included—that she was
the best,
my very favorite, destined for greatness
. . . Many girls jumped. Christie. Iman. Bitten. Kelly Emberg. Nancy Donahue. My sister Debbie. There’s not much loyalty in this business. In fact, betrayal is the norm.

Eileen Ford sued. Wilhelmina followed. The Model

Wars were on.

In a strange way, though, it was kind of exciting. Everyone was making such a fuss over us. We were being courted. We felt valuable. The business was really about buying and selling the most beautiful girls in the world, and I was one of them. Casablancas knew how to treat girls. Especially young girls. He was a businessman and lover both. And he was emerging as the clear winner in the Model Wars.

By this time, with money to burn, I talked Mike into renting a house in Southampton. Our friend Patrick Demarche

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 155

lier, the French photographer, along with Mia Skoog, his fiancée, a gorgeous Scandinavian model, decided to join us. We got this great place on the beach, a mansion. And we were supposed to go there to kick back and
relax.
But even when we weren’t working we were working. Out

there on the sand, shooting, posing, vamping.

I borrowed one of Mike’s old cameras and started fooling around. It was incredibly liberating. When I was modeling, I was being manipulated. When I was taking pictures, I was in control. Ask me which I preferred?

So of course I got serious about the work. I read books about light and composition. I looked at the work of modern geniuses—George Hurrell, Horst P. Horst, Avedon, Irving Penn—as well as that of past masters like Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue, Bill Brandt, and—one of my all-time favorites—Andre Kertesz.

Right from the start, Patrick was impressed with my photography. Mike was less generous. “Stick to modeling,”

he said. It pissed me off. But I still bought him a fucking platinum Rolex for his birthday.

We usually drove out to Southampton early Friday

afternoon, but one Friday things got crazy with work and I didn’t get home till six. Mike didn’t want to bother with the traffic, so we went to dinner and found ourselves near Studio 54.

“Come on,” I said. “One night isn’t going to corrupt you.”

He called Patrick from the restaurant pay phone—

believe it or not, there were no cell phones in those days—

and told him to meet us at the club. “Janice will make sure you’re on the list,” he said. He hated having to say that; he hated having to admit that I was getting us through the front doors, not him.

We walked the few blocks to the club. There was a huge

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

line snaking its way down the block. Most of the people were part of the Bridge-&-Tunnel crowd, kids from the outer boroughs who didn’t have a prayer of getting in, especially on a Friday night. But me—well, they knew me here.

“Hey, Janice! Come on up.” The doorman ushered us

over and slipped me a handful of tickets. “Have a few drinks on us.”

“One drink,” Mike muttered under his breath. “Sure.”

Okay. So they knew me pretty well. Big deal.

As we slipped past, I heard a girl say in her nasal Brooklyn twang, “Hey! That’s Janice Dickinson! That was Janice Dickinson!” Like I was God or something. Ask me if it felt good.

ME AND CHRISTIE IN GREEN TEA MASKS.

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 157

It was packed inside. And you couldn’t turn around

without seeing another famous face. I found myself being ogled by a very stoned John Belushi. He hugged me and gave me a big fat kiss on the cheek, like we were dear old friends. It was surreal. Here’s a guy that Mike and I had been watching on TV, with religious fervor, and he acts like we’re closerthanthis. It didn’t stop. There was Andy Warhol, with his mop of white hair; Liza Minnelli, with that permanent grin you wanted to slap off her face; Keith Richards . . . I wondered if Mick was around.

People kept coming over and introducing themselves, like they were trying to make points or something. That’s one of the things about fame I was still trying to get used to: the way complete strangers behave as if they’re part of your life. It’s odd, yeah, and off-putting. But it’s also weirdly seductive. You get hooked fast. You feel loved (and 158 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

God knows I’ve never turned down a chance at easy love).

I looked over at Mike and smiled at him. He wasn’t having a good time, but I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t leaving. And we had to wait for Patrick, anyway.

Steve Rubell came over, gave me a big kiss hello, and introduced me to Andy Warhol. “But we’ve met already,”

he said. Yes, we had, mostly in passing, but Andy seemed to know me better than I knew myself. He talked about spreads I’d already forgotten! It was uncanny.

“You seem to know an awful lot about me,” I said.

“Fame, Janice. Get used to it.”

We got into a long conversation about fame. He wasn’t selling that old fifteen-minute line, but what he
did
go on about was timing. Stuff that really made me think. He said fame was all about timing. Timing and luck, especially luck. I told him I didn’t agree: I said that some girls might have gotten lucky just sitting around looking pretty, but I’d had to fight like hell to get as far as I’d gotten.

“Yes,” he said, “but that’s one of the things people don’t understand about luck. Luck doesn’t just happen. You have to make your own luck.” I thought that was pretty profound. That’s why he was Andy Warhol.

The big phrase at the time was “of the moment.” It

made me sick. I swore I’d kill the next person who used it.

But in the seventies you heard it nine hundred times a day.

That magazine is of the moment. This new collection is of the moment. She’s so
of the moment.
I could have puked.

The problem with being “of the moment,” Andy told

me, was that moments pass, and people don’t know how to live
in
the fucking moment. Instead of enjoying themselves, they worry about who or what is creeping up behind them, or where they’re going to be the next day.

“You should live as if every minute is your last,” he told me. “One day, you’ll be right.”

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 159

He was wonderful. He had the sweetest, meekest,

mildest voice, and he would take hold of both my hands when we talked. He had the softest hands.

In the middle of my philosophy lesson, we ran into

Christie Brinkley. She was also at Ford, and she was very shy, and we were becoming quite friendly. She liked me because I was ballsy and outspoken, and I liked her because she was smart and cultured and spoke fluent French and smoked those wonderful Gitanes and had gone to all the best private schools in Los Angeles. I guess she had the life I felt I should have had. Or wanted to have. I don’t know. I guess you can’t exactly live your past vicariously, but that’s what I seemed to be doing.

She was beautiful, Christie, except for that big flat butt she was always trying to hide. She summed up the ideal: the blond, blue-eyed California girl. She was doing all sorts of wholesome girl-next-door work for Sears and people like that, but she was desperate to get into edgier things—like some of the stuff I was doing. For a while, we were like the two poles of modeling—one light, one dark.

After Warhol got dragged away, we went over to chat with Mike, who was standing in a corner alone, looking like a miserable fucking wallflower. Christie made a big fuss over him, but I didn’t mind. When she mentioned one of his recent spreads and called him a genius, his mood suddenly improved.

Patrick showed up a little later, with John Casablancas and a coterie of girls. Casablancas came over to say hello, but I turned my back. He hadn’t shown much interest in me when I was struggling in Paris; he could go jump in the Seine for all I cared.

I saw my friend and short-lived roommate, Edward,

across the room, and I hurried over. Edward was really making a name for himself as the go-to hair guy in the 160 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

fashion biz. He was with Sandy Linter, the fabulous makeup artist. She ran the salon on 57th Street where I’d met Edward, and she was dating the salon’s French owner.

Of course, this was before Gia Carangi came along and bulldozed her way into her life. I’m not blaming Gia. Gia was madly in love with Sandy. Their relationship turned into a fucking Greek tragedy. I still get upset when I think about the two of them.

Gia showed up as we were leaving. She had this way of touching you, her hand on the small of your back. Of looking at you—as if she were really interested, hanging on every word. It was strangely seductive. I’d met her before and liked her—liked the edge on her. Plus there was something seriously damaged there that I related to. She was eighteen, just starting out. She was very boyish, and kind of rough. (She never went anywhere without her switchblade.) Her stepfather owned a hoagie joint in northeast Philadelphia. It was obvious that that was where she’d learned her good manners.