No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (34 page)

Cosby answered the door in nothing but a white towel.

He was fresh from the shower, too; his black skin was glistening. He hugged me, a little too enthusiastically; told me N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 255

how much he’d missed me, and how nice it was to see me.

I believed him. Liquor does that to a girl.

“God, you’re beautiful.”

He kissed me, full on the lips, then went off to dress and we went downstairs, to dinner, where Cosby spent the next two hours talking about himself. It was
An Evening with
Bill Cosby. A Tribute to Bill Cosby.

And suddenly I remembered something Andy Warhol

once told me. It was his definition of an actor. He said, “An actor is a person whose eyes glaze over when the conversation is no longer about them.”

And I thought, Well, then,
Bill Cosby is an actor’s actor.

After dinner he asked me back to his room, and I went.

But I stopped myself at the door. “I’m exhausted,” I said, begging off. His eyebrows went a little funny.

“Exhausted?” he asked, and it was clear he was trying hard to keep his temper in check. “After all I’ve done for you, that’s what I get?
I’m exhausted.
”

“Well, gee, Bill,” I stammered. “If I had known it was going to be like this—”

He waved both hands in front of my face, silencing me.

Then he gave me the dirtiest, meanest look in the world, stepped into his suite, and slammed the door in my face.

Men.

Back in my room, I found a tiny bottle of Courvoisier in the minibar, poured it into a plastic cup, and began pondering some of the Big Questions:
What the fuck am I doing in
Tahoe? What the fuck am I doing with my life?
I dug through my bag for my bottle of Vitamin C and popped two Quaaludes and drifted off to sleep.

In the morning I checked out, took a cab to the airport, and got on the first flight to New York. I didn’t even call Cosby. What was I going to do—yell at him? Thank him for the opportunity? Try to explain?

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

I started to panic before the plane even landed, and the panic only grew worse as the cab got closer and closer to New York. Usually, as we crossed the bridge and the Manhattan skyline came into view, I would get that old feeling.

Here I am, where I belong.
But that day all I felt was terror.

I didn’t want to be in New York. I didn’t want to be anywhere. I was uncomfortable in my own skin.

I got to the apartment and tore it apart looking for drugs. I was completely out of Quaaludes, and there was barely enough coke dust to numb my gums. I looked

through the mail. There was a letter from Paris. I opened it.

It was from Pam Adams, my old childhood friend from Hollywood, Florida—a friend who’d disappeared from my life so many years ago. The handwriting looked shaky.

“Dear Janice,” she wrote. “I can’t believe how famous you are. You have never looked more beautiful. I have thought many times about writing you, but I’m sort of in awe. Do you even remember me? I miss you. I am in trouble. I am in Paris. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you lend me a little money? I really need help . . . Love, Pam.”

That was it. That was the whole letter. I assumed Pam wanted money for drugs. I didn’t know what to do.

Then the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“I told you we were going to make art.” It was Bill King, the photographer who had done the shoot for the Italians.

“How do I look?” That’s what I said. I couldn’t help myself. That’s what models always say.

“You look amazing,” Bill said. “Peppo just saw the

proofs. He wants to talk to you.” Peppo was the Italian publisher who’d given me my first paying break as a photographer, a lifetime ago, back in Malibu. Peppo loved me.

“Peppo wants to talk to me?”

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 257

“Got a pen? Here’s his number.”

It was a number in Milan. I dialed and got through.

Peppo was just leaving the office, but the secretary said he was eager to talk to me so she asked me to hold and ran after him. He was on the phone a moment later.

“Janice!” he said. “Janice Janice Janice!”

“Peppo,” I said. “Peppo Peppo Peppo.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I’m glad somebody does.”

“No, you don’t understand. You are so beautiful. Have you seen the proofs?”

“Not yet.”

“Janice—you’ve done it again.”

“What have I done?”

“You are showing us the way.”

“Peppo, you’re dreaming. What ‘way’? I can’t find my
own
way.”

He started waxing poetic about the future of fashion and androgyny and the melding of the sexes, and my beautiful short hair, and my perfect eyes and perfect lips and perfect bones and absent tits.

“What are you trying to tell me, Peppo?” I said, interrupting.

“I need you, Janice. Will you please come to Milan for a while?
Please?
I will get on my knees if it helps.”

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said.

I was en route the next day. I have never needed to be needed as much as I needed it that day. Sometimes I think Peppo’s call—and Bill King’s photographs—saved my life.

THE GOOD NUN

ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª

There was a limo waiting for me at the airport in Milan.

The driver was exceedingly polite. He took me to the Hotel Grand. I
felt
grand. I had fallen in love with Italy years earlier—with the food, the art, the architecture, the rolling hills—and I was back.

Peppo took me out to dinner that first night, and by the following day he had me working. And it didn’t stop. I was running from one end of the city to the other, from one job to the next, wildly popular and desperately wanted.

They pushed the androgyny. It was new and fresh and
shockant.
One day—I guess they were feeling particularly brazen—they paired me up with a stunning Yugoslavian girl for a Bulgari shoot. We were both nude, except for the jewels. Huge glittering rocks and huge emerald bracelets and huge pendants hanging between my nonbreasts. The little Yugoslav was getting very hot and bothered, and I yawned and thought,
They all want me. Men. Women.

Barnyard animals.

I kept promising myself that I’d find a nice little apartment and settle in and make a real home, but I was too busy working and too happy at the Grand. The staff were so wonderful. They all knew me: It was
Signorina
this,
Signorina
that,
Signorina
the other. I felt important. I felt I mattered. I felt loved.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 259

I became close friends with Daniela Moreira, who wrote about fashion for several Italian publications and was married to a fabulously wealthy textile manufacturer. I often dined at her house, or joined her and her friends at the best local restaurants. I didn’t have a moment to myself. It was wonderful. I was too busy to think, too busy for introspection.

I stayed away from cocaine, but I still drank. I fell in love with Italian wine. I became a bit of a connoisseur. I could tell what
side
of the hill the grapes were from. (Well, not really, but that sounded pretty impressive, didn’t it?) Daniela took me and a group of friends to Tuscany for the weekend, and we drank our way through several vineyards.

One of her friends was an Italian film director. He kept accosting me—in dark hallways, in corridors, by the ruins of a once-magnificent castle—to tell me he wanted me, that he couldn’t get me out of his mind. He did it with such passion I felt like I was in the middle of an Italian movie—

a bad one, maybe even one of his.

“But you’re married,” I said with theatrical aplomb.

“Not always,” he said.

It was a funny answer. But I turned him down. I turned down Alberto Grimaldi, too. And he was a fucking prince!

Alberto said he thought he was falling in love with me. I told him to get in line. But I was only joking. I told his sister, Princess Caroline, that she should find a nice girl for Alberto before he got himself in trouble.

“He’s attracted to trouble,” she said.

“So am I,” I said.

He kept calling. It was like a comedy routine. “Janice, why don’t you like me?”

“I like you, I like you,” I said. “But not now.”

“When, then?”

“I’ll let you know.”

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

“I’ll wait.”

How absolutely regal.

One night I went back to my hotel to find messages

from that Italian director, Prince Albert (again!), and Peter Beard, Cheryl Tiegs’s old beau. I called Peter, who was in Rome.

“Janice, you bitch,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Hiding,” I said.

“Nobody can find you.”

“That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?” I said.

“I tracked you down through Italian
Bazaar.
Are you living in Milan?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I’m not sure. It just sort of happened.”

“You look fantastic. You’re everywhere—all over

Europe. You look delectable. You look like a little boy.”

“Tell me something,” I said. “Do all heterosexual men hunger for little boys?”

Peter laughed so hard he almost choked.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Tell me you’ll go to Kenya with me and I’ll be all right,” he said.

“What’s in Kenya?”

“An assignment for American
Playboy.
It’s perfect for you. And the money’s very good indeed.”

“Is it slutty?” I ask him.

“Janice, darling—you couldn’t be slutty if you tried!”

That was the right thing to say. The following week I was on my way to Kenya.

Peter met me at the airport, took me back to the hotel, and introduced me to the two dowdy women from

Playboy
’s Chicago office. They’d brought duffel bags full of accessories. Fuck-me pants. Undies with zippers. Cow

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 261

boy hats. See-through bras—as if I needed a bra. And I said, “Ladies, this cheap shit doesn’t work for me.”

And one of them said, “I’m sorry. This is what you’re going to wear, sweetheart.”

“Yeah? We’ll see about that,
sweetheart
.”

So I went to see Peter, to whine about the outfits, and he agreed that the outfits were tacky in the extreme. And the two of us spent the rest of the morning in the local markets, buying incredibly beautiful African wraps. They have the most amazing fabrics in Kenya.
Maasai, shuka, kikoy.

And that’s what he shot me in. Then he asked me if I minded extending the shoot. He had a ranch at the base of Mount Kenya, right next to the place where Karen Blixen wrote
Out of Africa,
and he wanted me to see it. So we flew out in one of those lumbering prop planes and

landed on this dirt strip, where a Jeep was waiting for us on the tarmac. Peter hopped behind the wheel—very

macho—and we drove on the rutted dirt roads to his

ranch. It was pure, unspoiled wilderness. The place consisted of nothing but three huge tents in the middle of nowhere. The trees were so graceful they made me feel like weeping.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Peter asked me.

“Nice?
Nice?
Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s paradise.”

There were servants everywhere, and they cooked us

dinner out in this big open pit. Venison, I think it was. We ate and drank champagne and watched the sun set, and I felt like Meryl Streep. But I couldn’t remember any lines from
Out of Africa.
The only Meryl Streep line I could remember was, “A dingo ate my baby!”

We finished our champagne and turned in: me in one

tent, Peter in another. And in the middle of the night I woke to hear the most frightful growling and I screamed at 262 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

the top of my voice: “Peter! Peter, goddamn it! Get in here!”

A few moments later, I heard him coming. And I heard that sound again and I leapt into his arms, terrified. And he began to laugh. “What are you afraid of? It’s just a couple of big cats, fucking,” he said. And I said I didn’t care. I wanted him to stay with me, in my tent. And he slipped into my cot and held me. And it felt nice.

In the morning, Peter grabbed his equipment and we

drove to a nearby village that was popular with the tourists.

They had a collection of crocodiles there that were goddamn prehistoric. Some of them were up to sixteen feet long. Real monsters. Peter had the croc-wranglers anesthesize six of the biggest ones and tie their snouts together with transparent fishing line, then asked the men to pile the beasts on top of each other.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“I want you on top of that pile,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “No fucking way. You’re crazy.”

“Here, Janice. Have a beer.” Seemed like a good idea.

And of course by this time the tourists were out in full force, snapping away with their Instamatics. And, while the natives got busy building a pile of crocodiles, I fortified myself with beer.

Finally, it was the moment of truth. Peter helped me out of my wrap, and the men in the crowd ooohhed and aaahhed with delight. I was wearing the skimpiest little thong, and a tiny little top that barely covered my tiny little non-tits. And I was a little drunk, to be honest. I don’t see how I could have done it sober.

Two of the wranglers helped me across this stagnant little pond, toward the pile of crocs. I was terrified. For good reason. I put my hand on one of them and I could feel its skin move and flutter and recoil against my palm.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 263

“Come on,” Peter bellowed. “Hurry, before they wake.”

I began to climb. I could hear them purring like cats, asleep but not asleep enough for me. I could feel their low, guttural grunting; I could hear their wheezy breath.

But I was on top now. I’d made it. My bare feet hurt against their hard, leathery skin, but I didn’t care. The crowd was cheering; Peter was snapping away. And there I was, vamping and posing and kicking my legs like a crazy, drunken ballerina. And suddenly it occurred to me:
Janice.