From "Thing of Beauty"
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To her parents, Gia seemed to have been transformed overnight after attending a Bowie show. “She got involved with rock concerts, okay?” her stepfather, Henry Sperr, recalled. “And a bunch of people who went to rock concerts. They weren’t from around here. She got a Bowie haircut and that changed her personality completely. She seemed like a sweet, young little kid before, and then afterward … well, you know it probably had something to do with the drugs. She would be disrespectful, she would be constantly fighting, just over nothing. And she’d be very rebellious. You’d say, ‘Be home at ten o’clock,’ and she’d come home the next day.”
Ronnie and Gia immediately hit it off. When they saw each other, Gia made it a point to bite Ronnie, as a sign of playfully outrageous affection. Besides Bowie, they shared the bond of emotional, broken homes.
And Ronnie and Gia had something else in common. The Bowie kids did a lot of sexual posturing. Bowie was bisexual so, at least in theory, they were, too: they cross-dressed, they cross-flirted. In practice, however, few of them did in private what they claimed to do in public. And some of them didn’t do anything at all. All of which made life that much more confusing for people like Gia and Ronnie, who, deep inside, suspected that they really were gay, and wanted to do something about it.
The reinvented Gia who Karen Karuza met was still basically a quiet girl who did not yet possess great beauty. Still, there was something about her that drew attention and made people stare: even the severe Bowie haircut couldn’t dilute her visual appeal. Young men and women alike were stunned by the way she looked, her wicked grin, her perfectly squared shoulders, the utter fearlessness in her gait, the sad burn behind her wide eyes. She smoked Marlboros with cool distance and danced with abandon. At thirteen, she had already found in herself a seductive posture that made people want to break rules for her.
Nobody knew her from conversation. A dispassionate “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” a laugh and a shrug were her responses to most situations. She was personably vague one-on-one, and even her closest relationships were shallow. She rarely shared personal details with anyone. “She never talked about her family life or anything,” recalled one friend. “You know how teenage girls whine and cry about their moms? She would never do it.”
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...“I was sitting in a class once,” recalled one close friend, “and I heard a voice yell, ‘Yo, Ellen.’ I looked out the window, toward the window of the boys’ bathroom across the courtyard, and there was Gia’s ass sticking out. She was a wild child.”
“It was great at Lincoln,” Gia would later recount. “I guess they remember me because I used to chuck moons out the window all the time. It was real fun. Nobody knew my face, but they sure remember my ass.”..
Her mom:
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Suddenly, instead of frustration, Gia was bringing fun and excitement to her mother’s life. “Gia was good to me,” Kathleen said. “She was very thoughtful and took care of me. I remember one time we were driving to New York together in my ‘78 Corvette. We came up the Holland Tunnel and saw this cab go flying past. As we got to an intersection, he hit the curb and then he leaped in the air and dropped out of the sky onto the top of the ‘78 Corvette. Gia got out and started screaming at this cab driver. And the police are there, and she’s got this knife in her hand and she’s gonna knife this guy. And these New York cops are standing there watching this saying, ‘If she does knife him, we’ll never see it.’
“She was, really, the whole world to me. When she was home, the whole house would fill up. When she left it was empty. She had a certain way of coming through the door, like the Fourth of July and all fireworks were going off.”
Her photographer:
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Gia continued to provoke Stember and his crew. “I was meditating at the time, you know,” he recalled. “And I was sitting there on my bunk meditating and there was a little hatch above me. Suddenly I heard this sort of scuffling, but I wouldn’t open my eyes. And the next thing bang, bam, bam, bam, she and Bitten are lowering a radio full volume on a string. I’m trying to meditate and this radio is sitting in front of my face, full volume.
“Then the next thing is they’re both lying on deck, completely naked both of them, both holding sun oil, saying, ‘John, please would you put some sun oil on us?’ And I’m saying, ‘Listen, guys, you know I’m married’ [at that time to second wife, model Carrie Lowell], but they say, ‘But you have to do it.’ And this is the sort of games they’re playing. Wearing dresses with no underwear, sitting, like, with their legs wide open. And I come out of the companionway up to dinner and here they are sitting like that, just to provoke, constant provocation.
“One night we decided to play Monopoly. So, of course, with Gia and Bitten, I have to almost punch both of them out. Gia had a knife to Bitten’s throat because she thought she was cheating and had taken one of her properties. She was prepared to kill her. It took me two days to get them to stop threatening to kill each other.”
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In fact, some were already finding Gia to be a chore: she made everything harder than it needed to be. But Stember thought he saw something more behind her contentiousness than another dumb, spoiled model trying to make everyone’s life miserable.
“I had a lot of fun times with her,” he said. “But, basically, if you told Gia black, she would say white. If you told her to go left, she would go right. If you told her to sit there, she would stand. Whatever you told her to do, she would do the opposite and she did it to the biggest people in this business. They didn’t know what hit them. They’d never seen anything like it. Normally, the girls are like ‘Fuck me, fuck me, I’ll do anything for you.’ Gia was just fuck you.
“I have never met anybody who did it in the way that she did. It was so totally self-destructive—it was the way she dealt with herself, too. But she’d put a knife to your throat if you told her that. She had this anger, you know, this tremendous anger. It took a lot of ducking and diving to put up with her. She had to see you weren’t going to hit her back. I didn’t need to hit her: she was doing it all for me. So I just was her friend. She would take you and pow, just to see what you would do. If you didn’t get mad, then she’d begin to trust. But when she started to trust you, she’d feel guilty, pow, just for no reason.
“You see somebody like her and you become more aware of the human condition at its extreme end. Here’s a girl who’s extremely beautiful and in extreme pain. And you have to ask yourself: Why is someone who looks this way in so much pain?”
Others:
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I called Gia and said, ‘Call your mother and tell her what is going on.’ They didn’t really have the best of relationships. Obviously, the mother was interested in how the daughter was doing, what was going on: she seemed concerned, very normal motherly concern. Gia just couldn’t care less about telling her.”
While Gia stayed with her, Lizzette also got a glimpse at what passed for her support system in New York. “Gia had a lot of obscure friends,” she recalled. “She had a way of coming in and out of people’s lives, with such speed and so briefly: I think it was hard for her to have relationships for any length of time. You would see her for four hours but you would remember those four hours. I think Sandy is the one Gia spent the most time with.”
Increasingly, Gia’s colleagues had come to perceive her as a very cruisy bisexual who came on to most of the women she worked with but had some kind of ongoing relationship with Sandy Linter—or, as ongoing as two full-time freelancers who worked and parried around the world could be. Those who were closer to her believed she was more flirtatious than promiscuous.
“She was definitely bisexual,” said John Stember, “but she didn’t have a lot of sexual relationships, I’ll tell you that. She had major sexual problems, major. And for her to get into a sexual situation, it was not that easy at all. She wasn’t fucking around like crazy, at all. She had real difficulty with people. She could find very, very few people that she could spend any kind of time with and she spent a lot of time by herself, a lot of time. All this stuff with her image tends to make her out to be something she wasn’t. She had major problems being alive, with herself and finding any kind of ground to be with herself, which was why she was taking drugs most of the time because it alleviated the pain.”
In the meantime, she was developing a coterie of fair-weather fans and first-name-only drug connections—like Raul, who worked out of an apartment in the East Village and serviced a lot of the uptown fashion people. Gia had many work friends, play friends and drug friends. But few real friends.
Se dom. Her life is nuts. Could be either SLE or SEE, I just see a lot of counter-phobic Se?
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Fun fact I learned from skimming the book: Models pop Quaaludes to get the Ni dreamy-eyed look. That's probably what she's on in the first video.