No Lifeguard on Duty

by Janice Dickinson

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

  “SHAPE UP OR YOU’RE OUTTA HERE!” TOUGH LOVE FROM ALEXIS IN NEW YORK CITY.

  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. 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?”

  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 over-involved in the lives of their girls. They insist on knowing everything.

  “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.”

  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 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.

  “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.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “Let’s party.”

  The thing is, you start to feel immortal. Every day, every hour, someone’s telling you you’re beautiful, wonderful, a goddess. So you begin to believe it. And if you’re cursed with an accommodating constitution, as I was, you can party till six A.M. and show up for a shoot two hours later looking like a dew-kissed rose.

  Sure, there were times when you showed up late. Or not looking your best. But the business tolerates an awful lot. Especially when you’re on top. On more than one occasion I called a messenger service to go downtown to fetch a gram or two to get me through the day. No one said a word about it. We need her and she needs this and that’s the way it is. A little cocaine never hurt no-bo-dy.

  “You’re product, baby,” Ara Gallant once told me. “That’s all you are. Fashion seems so glamorous, but it’s just advertising. And as long as you’re selling their shit, they’ll do what they have to do to keep you upright and grinning.”

  You listen to people like Andy Warhol, and learn not to think beyond the moment. You learn not to peek around the next corner. And when people say things like “The only thing you have to know about the future is that everything gets worse,” you nod and murmur, Right on.

  Things certainly got worse for Gia. A lot worse. She was mainlining by this point. People started to call her “Sister Morphine” behind her back. She was only working for the drugs now. One summer night she finally fell completely apart and looked at herself in the mirror and went home to her mother to try to get her head straight. She got on methadone, and for a while it actually looked like she was turning her life around. She came back to Manhattan a few months later. Scavullo wanted to shoot her. I think he knew how much trouble she was in and—God bless his generous heart—he was doing what he could to help.

  In April 1982 the shoot made the cover of Cosmo. Gia looked beautiful, unless you looked real close. If you looked real close, and you knew Gia, you noticed something about her eyes; her eyes looked dead.

  The following year she left New York and never came back.

  You forget.

  Gia who?

  You compartmentalize.

  You learn not to think about anything that might fill you with terror, like your own uncertain future. Like the fact that you’re another day older.

  You party.

  You say, “Hey, I’m just a shallow happy girl.”

  And you get on with your shallow, happy life.

  When Ara Gallant wasn’t busy making Avedon’s models look beautiful, or taking pictures of his own, he was giving the best parties in town. His best friend, Zoli, of Zoli Models, had some very hot girls on his roster—Apollonia, Pat Cleveland, Angelica Huston, Geena Davis—and together they used the girls as first-class, surefire attractions for celeb-watching party-goers.

  Men are so easy! I was sitting in Ara’s crowded apartment one night trying to decide who to go home with. Warren Beatty was too good-looking; Dustin Hoffman too short; Robin Williams, the new kid on the block, too frenetic; and Jack Nicholson too much of a wolf. But Jack had a great smile, and he was irresistibly funny, and he really, really wanted me. He was surrounded by some of the most gorgeous models in the business, but he behaved as if I were the only woman in the room. So I left with Jack—much to Warren’s chagrin—and we went back to the Carlyle, where he had a suite. He ordered champagne and lobster and steak, rare, and he was a wonderful host. He wanted to know all about me, and he was earnest and genuine and attentive and outrageously funny. Yes, most of all he was funny. And I’m a sucker for a man who knows how to make me laugh. So I ask you: What’s a girl to do?

  You were okay, Jack. Really. And you can take that any way you want. But you pissed me off a little the next morning.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” Jack said as I was dressing. I had a shoot with Avedon, and I was hurrying because I was already late. “Don’t tell anyone you’ve got star cum inside you.” He wasn’t kidding, either. He was lying there naked, propped up on the pillows, grinning that famous grin. I couldn’t believe he could be so full of himself.

  “I hate to come and go,” I said, and I left.

  When I got to Avedon’s, Ara greeted me at the door. “So,” he said. “How was he?” Everyone was waiting to hear. Avedon and Way Bandy and Perry Ellis and the whole damn crew. They were all staring. Ara had obviously opened his big mouth.

  “Yes, it’s true,” I said at the top of my voice. “I’ve been up all night, fucking Jack Nicholson. And I don’t think he’ll be getting an Oscar this time out. Now, if you don’t mind, can we get to work?”

  Jack kept calling and calling, but I avoided him. He was fun, sure, but I felt empty. I wanted more than just that same old daddy-thing. I also felt a little guilty about Angelica Huston, Jack’s longtime girlfriend. I’d met her and liked her. So I wondered, Why am I sleeping with her man? Not to mention, why is he sleeping with me? Are all men dogs? Whatever happened to fidelity?

  “Why can’t I find a nice, decent guy?” I asked my friend Alexandra King, as her fuck-me parrot looked on. “Just a nice guy. That’s all I ask. Nice. Decent and nice.”

  “Your standards are too high,” she joked. Then she went on to tell me that she had this theory about why love doesn’t work. “It’s like this, see: A man meets a girl and thinks, ‘Wow, she is hot and mysterious and exotic and a little dangerous. I am way turned on by this bitch.’ So they jump into bed and start hanging out and before you know it she’s less hot and less exotic and not much of a mystery at all. In fact, she’s become completely domesticated. And he looks at her and wonders, ‘What am I doing with this crashing bore?’”

  Alexandra was smart. And her theory made sense. But there was another side to it. I brought my own demons to the party. I thought about putting an ad in the paper. Girl Seeks Dad. Must be kind and loving and nurturing and willing to deal with both of me: the beautiful self-confident babe and t
he little fucked-up girl inside.

  There was another man who also called around this time—twice—but I ignored him, too. It was Steven Spielberg. Someone at his office left a message for me at Ford: Mr. Spielberg had met me in a restaurant in Southampton and was interested in having me audition for something called Raiders of the Lost Ark. I didn’t remember meeting Mr. Spielberg, so I imagine I must have been really drunk at the time. That was starting to happen to me from time to time. Blackouts, they call them. Fugue states. You wake up the next day and your memory is shot through with holes. Raiders of the Lost Ark, huh? Audition, huh? He must have been talking to his friend Cosby. No thanks. I’m not that naïve.

  But there was a third man who kept calling around the same time, and he was the most persistent of the three. That man was John Casablancas. “You’re the only interesting model working nowadays,” he gushed. “I have to have you.” Yeah yeah. I know. I’m the bee’s knees. But I did think about it. And I started thinking real hard the day Monique Pillard left Eileen Ford and went to work for him.

  MY COMP CARD FOR ELITE.

  The thing is, I had a lot of anger in me in those days. I hadn’t yet figured out, of course, that it was all connected to my miserable childhood (boo hoo!), so it festered and manifested itself in strange and unexpected ways. At that point, not having a man in my life to be angry with, I was angry at a woman. Specifically, Eileen Ford. And the way I saw it, I had every right to be. She had been so dismissive of me when we first met, and now she was making money on me hand over fist. (Of course, if I’d been smart, I’d have seen that my anger had a lot more to do with my father than it did with her, with the fact that he had made me feel worthless and ugly; but I wasn’t smart in those days, at least not about my crazy emotions.) So I decided to punish Eileen. I went over to see John Casablancas. And I told him he could have me, but that he’d have to cut his commission to five percent. Because if I came, others would follow.