No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (27 page)

STUDIO, 1984.

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

“I think he likes you,” he said.

“Really?” I said. I felt like a five-year-old, hungry for approval.

“Really,” Stubie said. He was still smiling that stupid smile, only now it looked like it was starting to hurt.

I left the studio and hurried off. It was pouring out, and I was late for dinner with Debbie, so I charmed some middle-aged man into sharing a cab with me. He was very nice. He talked about his wife and kids all the way uptown, then asked if he could see me some time. I told him he should be ashamed of himself and got out and hurried through the rain to Debbie’s building. She and Edward Tricome had parted, now she’d found a nice little flat in a quaint old building on the East Side. She was an Uptown Girl all the way.

I told her the whole Cosby story. “I think he wants to sleep with me,” I said.

“Of course he wants to sleep with you,” she said. “You can’t sing.”

Debbie could be blunt like that. And as self-absorbed as the next model. Suddenly we were talking about her brilliant career. She was worried; she didn’t have her next gig lined up. Guy Bourdin was having an open casting for a lingerie catalog for Bloomingdale’s. I figured we should go together.

“Are you interested?” I asked.

“Are you kidding!?” she said. “Where do I sign up?”

The phone rang. It was Alexis. She sounded depressed, so I told her to come to town for a lingerie shoot. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I was always worried about Alexis. I’m sure guilt had something to do with it: I had this crazy image of her living in a commune without electricity or running water, selling beaded necklaces by the side of a rural highway. And I felt she deserved better.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 199

“But I’m not a model,” Alexis protested.

“No,” I said, “but you have a perfect ass.”

When I got off the phone, Debbie looked crushed.

“More perfect than mine?” she asked.

“No, Debbie,” I said with a tired sigh. “You have a perfect ass, too.”

The phone rang again. I thought it would be Alexis, but it was Julio Iglesias. Yes,
that
Julio Iglesias. Debbie had a taste for the exotic, as it were.

Alexis arrived a few days later—Cosby never called, by the way—and we did the lingerie shoot with Guy Bourdin.

“You have a perfect ass,” he told Alexis at one point, and I swear Debbie looked like she was going to burst into tears.

Alexis stayed at my place for a while, until one day in the supermarket on the corner she met this crazy Italian guy named Gianni. He was a commercial photographer, known for his beer ads. He talked about beer incessantly.

“SHAPE UP OR

YOU’RE OUTTA

HERE!” TOUGH

LOVE FROM

ALEXIS IN NEW

YORK CITY.

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

Now I know that if I ever need to make a tepid glass of beer look all luscious and foamy, all I have to do is add a little salt. Fascinating, huh? Well, Alexis thought so. She moved in with him. The next thing you know she’s working as a photographer’s rep, repping him and this Polish friend of his, making money and being good at her job and enjoying life. Six months later she goes to City Hall and marries the guy, a complete stranger. But who was I to judge? She was in love. And I had both my sisters back.

And for a while we were like a real family. The three Dickinson girls, visiting each other and meeting for dinner and just hanging out, with their three perfect asses all in a row.

Family: It had eluded me my whole life, until now.

That summer I rented another house in Southampton, a comfortable distance from the old place. It was more modest, but certainly big enough for me and my friends and family. I was still spending money like crazy. I’d gone to see an accountant who tried to get me to start thinking about the future, but every word out of his mouth—
IRA,
SEP, zero-coupon bonds
—just flew over my head. I liked words like
lobster
and
champagne
and
caviar;
that was my portfolio. I figured I’d keep investing in the basics. So I acted like a rich person, like I had too much money to worry about money. And I just kept being
of the moment
and living
in
the moment.

So one night at the Southampton house I’m deeply
in
the moment
—coked out of my head, drinking champagne from the bottle because I’d just broken the glass and didn’t have the energy to walk into the kitchen for another. And Gianni is sitting there, across from me, so stoned he’s cross-eyed. And Alexis is asleep in one of the bedrooms.

And Gianni does another line of coke and totters a little, like he’s about to keel over. And I say, “Are you okay?”

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 201

And he looks at me for the longest time, looks at me like he doesn’t know who the fuck I am; and he begins to shake his head from side to side. I think he’s going to cry.

And he says, “My life is a fucking mess. I married a stupid American girl for a green card.”

It was like a slap in the face. Sobered me right up. I said, “Excuse me? Do you know who you’re
talking
to, asshole? Do you know where the fuck you are?”

And Gianni looks at me and claps his hand over his

mouth like something out of a cartoon.
Did I say that out
loud?
And now he’s mumbling to himself in Italian, mumbling and praying.

And I throw the bottle of champagne, and he ducks

and it hits the wall and smashes, and I get up and go into Alexis’s room and wake her up.

“What? What?” she says. She’s disoriented, scared.

And I tell her what her fucking husband just told me. “I don’t want that motherfucker in my house another minute,”

I say. And she gets up without a word and goes out to the living room, with her little sister Janice at her heels, and says, “Gianni, is this true?”

And he’s trying to explain, in Italian, invoking the Holy Virgin and a slew of other characters from the Bible, and Alexis picks up an ashtray and hurls it at him and he runs out of the house. And that was the last time I saw the motherfucker. Running down the street, barefoot, at three in the morning, and out of our lives forever.

When I got back to work the following week, Monique Pillard asked me into her office.

“How are you?” she asked. Monique was everyone’s

surrogate mother. But bookers are like that. They get overinvolved in the lives of their girls. They insist on knowing everything.

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“You don’t want to know,” I said.

Monique’s table was always cluttered with containers of Chinese food. She speared a shrimp. She was very deft with the chopsticks. I noticed her chubby fingers.

“I need a favor from you,” she said.

“What?”

“Gia’s in trouble. I want you to look after her.”

I called Gia, and we hooked up for drinks later that night at Trader Vic’s. By this point she’d made the leap from snorting coke to snorting heroin, and it was fucking her up something awful. The previous week, at Avedon’s, she spent three hours with Way and Ara getting ready for a cover shoot. Avedon took one picture, and Gia announced that she had to pee. She went to the bathroom and never came back.

“Who told you that?” she asked. She thought it was

funny.

“Monique,” I replied.

“It’s true. I was bored.”

“You can’t do that, Gia. It’ll get around.”

“Look at these assholes,” she said. She could change subjects at a moment’s notice. I looked around the bar.

Men were staring at us, drooling. I made eye contact with one guy and I swear he passed out. All the blood must have rushed out of his head, on its way to his penis. One guy actually got the courage to come talk to us, but he didn’t get beyond his ballsy introduction: “Here I am. What were your other two wishes?”

Gia hated men. We started talking about the worst

pickup lines we’d ever heard.

Gia’s favorite was, “Can I borrow a quarter? My mother told me to call home when I met the girl of my dreams.”

I liked, “Hi, I’m Gary. And you’re going be screaming my name all night long.”

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 203

Gia came back with, “I’m new in town. Could I have

directions to your house?”

We were bowled over with laughter. Gia fell off her stool. Every man in the place was staring at us. Crazy or not, they wanted us bad.

“Some guy grabbed my butt once and asked, ‘Is this

seat taken?’ ” Gia said. She decked him. She
loved
decking guys.

I had a guy come up to me at an airport once, very

intense, right in my face, and say: “The voices in my head told me to come talk to you.” I don’t think he was kidding.

“So,” she said, finishing her drink. “Monique asked you to keep an eye on me?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Let’s go find some coke,” she said. And that’s exactly what we did.

In the next few months, Gia and I worked on a bunch of shoots together. I tried talking to her, but I don’t think it helped. All she ever wanted to talk about was drugs and Sandy Linter. She was obsessed with Sandy Linter, who had gone and fallen in love with Gia and dumped her boyfriend and was trying very hard to have a normal, lesbian relationship. But Gia was too intense on every level.

She loved Sandy so much it was killing her. Sandy never loved her back hard enough. Sandy was never committed enough. Sandy didn’t
feel
deeply enough.

She was so lost, Gia. She hated herself. She said she liked heroin because it made her hate herself less. And she hated men.
Loathed
them. She told me that men had been trying to fuck her since she was eight years old. Her cousins tried to fuck her. Her neighbors tried. Every derelict who walked into her stepfather’s hoagie joint tried to fuck her.

“I can count the number of guys I’ve fucked on one

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

hand,” she told me. “And then it was only because I needed drugs.”

One day, the two of us were over at Chris von Wagonheim’s studio. He had very dark sensibilities. He was heavily into S&M. We were vamping for the camera, and things got a little raunchy, and Gia tried to stick her tongue down my throat. I stopped her. I told her she was just missing Sandy. They had the most volatile relationship in the world, and Sandy had just told her—again, maybe for the hundredth time—that she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Fuck her,” Gia said. “I don’t need anybody.”

I liked her. She was funny, mouthy, wild, mischievous—

and horribly insecure. Remind you of anyone? Insecurity made both of us self-destructive, yes—but Gia took it to a whole new level. She
really
didn’t give a shit. I think that was her Achilles’ heel, this total not-caring. She’d been
handed
her career. I paved the way for her and a hundred beautiful mutts like her, and she’d never really had to struggle. It had been so easy for her that it didn’t mean anything. That was the big difference between us. She didn’t give a shit, but I did; I really did. I cared enough to survive.

One time we were doing a shoot for Italian Bazaar. I took a bathroom break and she followed me inside.

“You look tired,” she said.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. I
was
tired. I’d been on the road for weeks. Crossing time zones. Hurrying through airports.

Working working working. And when I wasn’t working, I put everything I had into partying. I would wake up some days and not know where I was or even—on really bad mornings, for a moment or two—
who
I was. The lack of sleep and the free-floating jet lag were catching up with me.

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“Here,” Gia said. She was offering me a snort. Why

not? I never stood on ceremony when it came to a little pick-me-up during a shoot.

But the moment I did that first line, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t coke; it was fucking heroin.

When I opened my eyes, all these people were standing over me in a circle, staring down at me. I was flat on my back. Somebody helped me up. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten all day.” Sure!

Buy that and I’ve got a bridge for you. “I’m feeling better already.”

They wiped the vomit off my chin and helped me

change. I made it through the shoot. I was Supermodel, after all. I could do anything!

I didn’t say a word to Gia for the rest of shoot. Didn’t say a word back in the changing room. Didn’t say a word till we reached the street.

“You fucking cunt!” I shouted, and punched her right in the face. Gia laughed. She thought it was funny.

“Hit me again,” she said. “I like it.”

I hit her again. People had stopped to stare. Gia laughed again. She was loving it. I hit her again until I couldn’t hit her anymore, and then we were both laughing like maniacs, in the middle of the street, and drawing a pretty good crowd.

“Say you’re sorry,” I said.