No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (5 page)

It was so fucking confusing. This was my hero? This crazy hostile motherfucker represented
hope
?

CROSSTOWN

TRAFFIC

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

I spent most of that summer on a float in Eric’s pool, with the music cranked to the max. I loved loud music. Loud music drowned out all the voices in my head. It kept the demons at bay.

Mangione would come over in jeans so tight you

could read Braille through them. Yeah, it was pathetic, but I kind of liked him. He was an incorrigible flirt. He was always telling me how much he wanted me. And he said he’d wait because I was worth waiting for. Girls like to hear that kind of shit. Especially if they’re as fucked up as I was.

That was the summer I met Pam Adams, who possessed

all the security I lacked. I think she was related to John Quincy Adams. She had milky white skin and freckles and the most gorgeous hazel eyes, and I found her irresistibly beautiful. So did most of the guys at Nova Junior High.

And she knew it; she’d slept with plenty of them. She did everything I wouldn’t do. “I wish you had a cock, Janice,”

she told me once. “You’d make a great boyfriend.”

She met Mangione and liked him. And one afternoon, at Eric’s place, with the sun hot and high in a clear sky, and the place crowded with neighborhood kids, and my

courage fueled, in part, by Pam’s approval, I asked Eric what
he
thought of Mangione. Eric looked over at Man26 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

gione, who was lying in the shade, stoned. We had a head-on view of his prominent crotch. I was dead curious about that thing. I was curious about what it would feel like inside me.

“I would love to wrap my lips around that big cock,”

Eric said. He’d been trying for years, apparently, but it wasn’t happening. He knew why, though. Or so he thought.

His theory was that guys who know they’re gay are always too afraid to get it on with other guys, because they realize there’s no going back. “Once you’ve had me,” Eric liked to say, “you’re hooked.”

By sundown, only Mangione, Eric, and I were left by the pool. Most of the other kids must have had real families. I didn’t feel like going home. My father was away at sea again, and Mom was working the night shift.

Darkness fell, but the heat just wouldn’t quit. Still, it was a sexy kind of heat, the kind of heat you see in movies: you know, the whirring fan, white curtains billowing in the breeze, the blue-green Caribbean visible beyond the deck.

Languorous
heat, I’d guess you’d call it. I know that’s how I was feeling. Languorous. And I guess Mangione was feeling it, too. Only he’d probably call it
horny.

When Eric went into the house, Mangione turned to

look at me. “You have the sweetest, tightest little ass I’ve ever seen,” he said.

My Little Flower tingled. I called it my Little Flower because that was the name of the Sunday school I’d been packed off to when I was still too young to protest. They talked about God being inside you. I wondered how He got there. I used to think maybe He crawled in between my legs. So I’d put my little hand between my little legs and hold it there, tight against my damp Little Flower. And it felt good: God-like.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 27

“That’s right,” I said. “And it’s
my
ass.”

Mangione just smiled.

Eric emerged from the house. He’d been watching us

flirt for years and years and he must have thought we were pretty pathetic. But at that moment our unrequited passion was the last thing on his mind.

“What?” I asked.

He held up three tabs of windowpane acid. “Look what I found in my mother’s stash,” he said. We looked at each other. It was one of those moments.
Do we go for it?
And we did. (Parents, please note: Take your kids to the movies once in a while, especially on Saturdays. Most girls lose their virginity on a Saturday. And don’t leave your fucking drugs where your kids can find it.)

The next thing I know, dawn is about to break, Jimi Hendrix is wailing on the stereo—“Crosstown Traffic,” I think—and Mangione is wailing on me. On
top
of me.

Inside
me.

And let me tell you, it was
not
fun. Getting your cherry popped while peaking on acid is definitely
not
the ticket, girls. Trust me. I felt like my insides were being hacked apart with a machete. I was screaming, all right. But not for joy.

Mangione didn’t quite get it, though. He thought he was giving me the time of my life. He was up there pumping, beaming, proud.
Take it all, bitch!
He thought he was taking me places I’d never dreamed of going. And he was right, but they were the wrong places.

You’d think the experience would have soured me on sex, but I knew sex couldn’t be that bad. So from time to time, almost reluctantly, I tried again—usually with guys who looked a little like Jim Morrison. Things improved, sure—

there was less pain, for starters—but where was the magic?

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

One night, the latest Morrison wanna-be took me down to the Hotel Diplomat to a B. B. King concert. I loved B.

B. King. I had every album he’d ever made. I loved plenty of other musicians—the Doors, Otis Redding, Aretha, the Allman Brothers, Michael Jackson—even some of that

nyaa nyaa nyaa music, but B. B. King ruled. It was an awesome show, made that much more electric by the piano player. He was this intense guy, the only white guy in the band, and the way he played turned me on something

awful.
That’s it,
I thought to myself.
That right there is
what I call passion.

We went backstage after the concert. My friend didn’t want to but I got all pouty and manipulative and used my considerable charms to get past the security guard. In a heartbeat, I was introducing myself to the piano player. His name was Ron Levy, and he looked a little like Morrison, a Jewish Jim Morrison. Okay, call me crazy. But it’s the truth. He looked more like Morrison than the guy I’d come with—and he looked a
lot
like Morrison.

Ron Levy shook my hand and wouldn’t let go. I went

all ga-ga. That fair skin, the baby fuzz on his chin, the Kool dangling from those moist, kissable lips. “Hey,” he said.

He looked me in the eye when he talked. And his voice was gentle and tender. “I’m glad you enjoyed the show,” he said. “What’d you say your name was?
Janice
—I love that name. You from around here, Janice? You have time for a drink, Janice?”

There was nothing I wanted more than to run off with Ron Levy and have a drink and listen to his dulcet voice and fall into his bottomless green eyes. But I wasn’t that trashy. I couldn’t do that to my date. So I went back to Hollywood with my friend and pretended he was Ron

Levy. It was nice, but I still didn’t know squat about the Elusive Female Orgasm.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 29

* * *

It pissed him off. And the violence escalated.

One night I got home after curfew; I was supposed to be there at 10:30, but it was storming like crazy and I could barely see to drive home.

“You’re late,” he barked. It was a few minutes after eleven.

“Look out the window,” I said, unable to bite my lip.

“That sound you hear is thunder.”

Wham!
He hit me in the face and broke my lip. He’d always been smart about that—no visible marks, no blood.

But he got a little carried away, and suddenly there was that locked-in-the-trunk fear in his eyes again. He moved toward me and began to stammer.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I said, snarling. “I’ll go to the police.”

He backed off. He was terrified.

By the time Mother came home my lip had started to

swell. She couldn’t help but notice, and all at once she began playing nurse. She took me upstairs and sat me on the edge of the tub and dabbed at the cut till it was clean.

Tears were streaming down my face, but they had nothing to do with the torn lip. And she knew it. I mean, Christ—

you’d think a normal mother would ask what happened.

But she didn’t ask. Because she didn’t want to know; because she already knew.

After she finished what she was doing, we sat there in 30 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

the bathroom, face-to-face, quiet, saying nothing for the longest time. Finally she broke the silence. “I never noticed how amazingly beautiful you are,” she said. “You are much more beautiful than any of those girls in the magazines you’re always looking at.”

It was the nicest thing she had ever said to me. And I just fell apart.

Those girls in the magazines.
Okay, I admit it. I had my share of crazy childhood fantasies. I wanted to be discovered. I thought, you know, I’d be out at the mall and an elegant older woman would come up to me and say, “Hello, my name is Eileen Ford. I think you have what it takes to be a model. Here’s my card. Please call me as soon as you can, and I’ll send you a first-class ticket to New York.”

Or I’d be working at the Orange Bowl, and Richard

Avedon would come in with Lauren Hutton for a slice of pizza. I’d act real cool, like I didn’t know who they were, and mosey on over to take their order. And Lauren Hutton would look up at me, and her jaw would drop, and she’d say, “My God! Richard!
Look
at her! Look at those gorgeous lips! This is it! This girl is the Next Big Thing!”

Yes, it’s true. When I was sixteen, Lauren Hutton was my hero. I loved the way she sailed across the pages of
Vogue.
I mean, to use an expression of the day, she was
bomb-diggedy.
This was a girl who had survived her childhood in Florida and made it in the big leagues. I loved her face. I loved the gap between her teeth. I loved that mischievous look in her eyes. I loved her because she gave me hope.

And Richard Avedon, well—he was The Master. I think back on it, and of course I was only just beginning to appreciate his art. But there was something bright and clean about the images; the way he lit his girls; the way N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 31

you felt they were literally staring back at you, smiling at you, telling you—
me,
in this case—that you were one of them.

“Do you really think I’m as beautiful as they are?” I asked my mother. We were still in the bathroom, facing each other. She reached across and wiped away my tears.

I felt so fucking ugly my whole life. I was too thin and I had no tits and I didn’t see them coming in any time soon.

“More beautiful,” she said.

And I believed her. I
wanted
to believe her. By the time I was fourteen, I had probably spent a thousand afternoons on the cold linoleum floor of the local Publix supermarket, poring over the fashion magazines as they arrived.
Glamour,
Mademoiselle, Vogue.
I was a fixture there. Me, little Janice, lost in those pages, my long spindly legs blocking the aisle.

The magazines seemed thicker in those days, more substantial, like little phone books, and I studied them as if I were preparing for finals. All those amazing women! Cheryl Tiegs. Rene Russo. Apollonia. Gunilla Lindblad. Lauren Hutton. Yes, especially Lauren Hutton. She was paper thin, and not classically beautiful—like Grace Kelly, say. And even when she was standing still, she looked as if she were flying. And I would think,
I can fly, too. And I’m not Grace
Kelly, either. And I’m as thin as she is.
I figured that I, too, could stand on the snowy slopes behind the Suvretta-Haus resort in Saint Moritz, in my fluffy beaver cap, my gloved hands resting on my ski poles, looking radiant and beautiful and happy.

I’d turn the page and see Catherine Deneuve in a St.

Laurent tuxedo; turn it again and see Marisa Berenson in a billowy Bill Blass gown.
I can do that, too,
I told myself.

I’d look good in a tweed suit by Coco Chanel. Or anything by Halston: I loved the way Halston layered fabrics; he could layer me anytime at all.

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

The thing is, I
had
to believe. I had nothing else. Modeling was going to be the way out for me. Without my crazy fantasy life, I was lost.

“The new
Vogue
’s in, Janice!” It was Doris, with her raspy voice. She was in her late fifties and had leathery skin and platinum, bubble-teased hair. She put in forty hours a week as a checker, and Friday nights she went off to play bingo with her friends. This was her life. “What is it with you and these magazines?” she asked. “You’re like a drug addict.” And I thought,
Doris, you don’t know how
right you are.

The week after my mother told me I was beautiful, she took a morning off from work and said she had a surprise for me.

“What’s the surprise?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now, would it?”

She told me to dress nice and helped me with my

makeup, but she refused to tell me where we were going.

I put on a form-fitting silk shirt with high-waisted bolero pants and platform shoes;
always
the platform shoes.

We got in the car, and I kept pestering her, and she’d just laugh and smile and say, “You’ll see!” For a moment there I thought,
She’s almost like a normal mother.

And then we pulled off the freeway and she parked in front of a squat little building with a small sign out front that read,
John Robert Powers/School of Modeling.
I couldn’t believe it. She really did think I was beautiful.

And we went inside and met the woman who ran the

place, Dawn Doyle, a perfect little specimen, all poise and polish. She looked me up and down with obvious displeasure, like this was some kind of joke or something. But then suddenly—
ka-ching!
—“We have another paying client, people!” So she changed her tune. Smiled. Became pleas