“You’re crazy,” Casablancas said.
“Then what do you need me for?” I said, standing to leave.
“Okay,” he said when I reached the door. “You win. I’ll take the five percent.”
I walked back. Sat. Reached for the phone on his desk.
“It’s Janice,” I barked into the receiver. “I need to speak to her. Now.”
A moment later, Eileen was on the phone. “Hello?” she said. “Janice?”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s me. Big-lipped Janice.”
“How are you, dear?”
“I’m leaving you,” I said. “I’m going to Elite. I don’t like you, I’ve never liked you. The only good thing about you is Monique Pillard, and she’s here, so I don’t know what the hell I’ve been waiting for.”
And I hung up. Casablancas was smiling at me. Shaking his head. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“You have no idea,” I said.
My life didn’t change all that dramatically. I was still Janice, and everybody still wanted me. Virginia Slims, Suntori liquors, Revlon. But none of these gigs had anything to do with Casablancas. At the end of the day, even with the reduced commissions, Casablancas got the better end of the deal. I knew everyone and I introduced him to everyone, and when I wasn’t available there was always another girl in his stable. So, yeah, in retrospect—he was a smart businessman, very smart. There was only one slight problem: I didn’t have Eileen Ford to kick around anymore, and I needed someone to kick around. So I began to notice men again.
I noticed Warren Beatty a lot. It was hard not to. He was editing Reds at some place in Manhattan, and I ran into him at dinner one night, and he called me over and said he’d like to see me. He was with some pale, mousy little man who didn’t say anything, just stared at me with his mouth open. I think he was a writer.
“Why do you want to see me?” I asked. “Did I get a good review from your friend Jack?”
Warren laughed. “No,” he said. “I just want to see you.”
“Well, you’re seeing me now,” I said, doing my best Mae West.
Warren laughed again and asked me to join him and the drab little writer, but I couldn’t do it. I was on my way to Studio 54. I invited him to come along, but he said he didn’t party; didn’t like that scene. It was true. I found out later that both his parents had been heavy drinkers, and that Warren himself decided early in life that he’d never drink or do drugs. He never did, as far as I know.
So I went to Studio 54 and hooked up with a model called Minka, and I told her that Warren was after me. She said she didn’t trust good-looking men. She wanted to be the pretty one in the relationship. I noticed her eyeing an ugly guy at the bar; his arms were covered with tattoos. I guess that was more her speed.
“I’m thinking of getting a tattoo,” she said.
“Why would you want to do that?” I asked. This was long before every other suburban housewife in America was out there getting a tattoo.
“Janice!”
I turned to find Diana Vreeland making her way over. She was the doyenne at Vogue. I loved her. She was so theatrical, with perfect blood-red fingernails that clicked and slashed when she talked. “How are you, darling?” she said.
“Minka is thinking of getting a tattoo,” I said above the din.
“A tattoo!?” She flung her bead back and threw her eyes open in horror. “Oh no, dear! No no no! Never mar your body with ink!” And then she saw Liza Minnelli and hurried away.
“There you go,” I said, turning to face Minka. And I mimicked Diana’s highbrow lilt: “No no no, dear. Never mar your body with ink!”
My sister Debbie showed up; we were both at Elite now. And then Iman arrived, followed by Andie McDowell and Apollonia. And I was looking at all of these beautiful girls and I had a crazy thought.
“John, it’s me, Janice. Janice the Great.” It was morning. I was in my red bedroom, in my new apartment on West 74th Street, across from the Dakota, calling Casablancas. It occurred to me that my walls were the same color as Diana Vreeland’s fingernails.
“How are you, Janice?”
“I’m still the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“I know,” he said.
“Say, ‘Yes you are, dear. Whatever you want, dear.’”
“Yes you are, dear. Whatever you want, dear.”
“I want to shoot a Christmas calendar for Elite.”
“Huh?”
A few weeks later, I got all of them together in a studio: Beverly Johnson, Iman, Andie, Debbie, Rita, and half a dozen other Elite girls, along with Casablancas himself. I put Johnny in a Santa Claus outfit; the girls—well, I had them in next to nothing. There was more pink Cristal than there were chateaux in the Loire Valley. The walls were buzzing. And the music was cranked up so loud that one of the lights exploded. But the end result was amazing. The calendar was a huge hit. I wish I still had a copy. People were coming up to me for weeks afterward, going on and on about how the pictures leapt off the page.
“It’s not enough for them to leap off the page,” I told one of my admirers. I was at another one of Ara’s legendary parties. “I want them to grab you by the throat and wrestle you to the ground.”
There really was no stopping me. I could walk, talk, snort coke, and take pictures.
Warren beckoned from across the room. He was with Bitten Knudsen, a gorgeous blond model, very hot in the seventies. I went over. “Do I know you?” I said.
He laughed and waved me into the empty seat next to him. “So,” he said once he had me where he wanted me, “how bad are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“All this press you girls are getting. They make you sound like monsters.”
It was true. In 1981, New York magazine did a piece on “The Spoiled Supermodels.” And the New York Daily News ran a long series on “The Dark Side of Modeling.” It was your basic fluff: We used drugs. We were demanding. We did unspeakable things in the back rooms of Studio 54.
“They didn’t get it right at all,” I said. “We’re much worse than that.”
Warren and Bitten ended up coming back to my place. Bitten and I did a few lines and drank a little cognac, and Warren promptly fell asleep on the couch. After Bitten finally left, I went over and woke Warren up. He was incredibly handsome. He wasn’t one of those people who have to get up in the morning and fix their faces.
“What’s happening?” he said.
“You have to go.”
THE INFAMOUS ELITE CALENDAR SHOOT.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ANDIE MACDOWELL, PEGGY DILLARD, LISA PATE, DEBBIE DICKINSON, BEVERLY JOHNSON, RITA FALLONE, IMAN, SHEILA JOHNSON. JOHN CASABLANCAS.
“Where’s Bitten?”
“She left.”
“Good,” he said. “I want to stay here.”
“You can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Come on,” I said. And I walked him downstairs and flagged a cab.
“Why won’t you let me stay with you?” he asked. Clearly he wasn’t used to rejection.
“Because you’re much too good-looking,” I said, “and I’ll probably go and fall in love with you.”
The cab pulled up. “But I want you to fall in love with me,” he said.
I got the door for him and eased him into his seat. “Me and everybody else,” I said.
“Janice—”
I shut the door. “Take this man back to the Carlyle Hotel,” I told the driver. “And don’t stop anywhere. He’s dangerous.” The cab sped off and I went back to my apartment, feeling quite proud of myself. I’d been a good girl.
The next night, Warren invited me to dinner. He said Bitten was coming, too. I went over to the Carlyle and he asked me up and he was waiting for me at the door to his suite. He was on the phone, and he put a finger to his lips, urging me to be quiet. I looked around. His suite was even nicer than Jack Nicholson’s; it was bigger and had a piano. I guess those two were always competing. Probably still
are.
I tried not to listen to Warren’s conversation—he was talking to Diane Keaton, one of the women in his life—but I could tell he gave good phone. I could imagine Diane on the other end, feeling deeply loved. Then the second line rang and he had to ask her to hold and it was the other woman in his life, Mary Tyler Moore. He made her feel deeply loved, too. I half-listened as he juggled both of them for a few minutes. Then, finally, at long last, he was rid of them and turned to look at me. God, he was pretty.
“Janice, Janice,” he said. He rubbed his hands together like a man about to sit down to a good meal. “You look beautiful, Janice.”
“That was quite the performance,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“The way you juggled those two calls. I swear, just standing here, I could feel the love coming off you in waves.”
“You’re funny,” he said.
“Where’s Bitten?” I asked.
“She’s meeting us at the restaurant. Can I offer you a drink?”
BITTEN KNUDSEN AT A CATALOG SHOOT.
“No,” I said. “It’s hard enough to resist you sober.”
He liked that. He laughed and got his coat and we went downstairs and walked to the restaurant. Bitten really was waiting for us. She was very sweet. She ate quickly and left early. I wondered if Warren had asked her along just to make me feel safe.
“Why don’t you walk me back to my hotel,” he said after dinner.
“No, thanks,” I said, hailing a cab.
He kissed me on the cheek—he wanted more, but I turned my head—and I got in the cab and waved ta-ta as it pulled away. I loved the expression on his face: stunned disbelief. He’d perfected that look in Bonnie and Clyde.
I called Debbie when I got home. “Guess what I didn’t do tonight?” I said.
“What?”
“Sleep with Warren Beatty.”
“Where’s he staying?” she asked. Don’t worry, she was just kidding. Debbie was funny, too.
Warren called and called and called. I kept putting him off. At the end of the week I had to fly to the Caribbean to do a shoot for Elle. (Oh, the drudgery.) But I spent the entire shoot thinking about him.
When I landed back in New York, I found myself standing in the baggage-claim area, waiting for my things, still thinking about that man. I walked over to a pay phone and called the Carlyle. He was in.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At JFK,” I said. “I just landed. You sure nobody’s there? You’re not juggling calls again, are you?”
“Why don’t you come over?”
“Bitten’s not there? Can it really be—Warren is all alone?”
“I won’t be if you come over,” he said, laughing. So I did.
He sat down and played the piano for me—what a delight—then ordered room service. We ate by candlelight. He asked me about me. Hung on my every word. Made me feel like the center of the universe.
Of course I slept with him. I’d been wanting to since the first time I’d laid eyes on him. He was great, if you must know. He knew where everything was and what to do with it. But of course he’d had lots of practice. I tried not to think about just how much.
I woke up a few hours later, at around three in the morning. Warren wasn’t in bed. I looked across the room and found him admiring himself in the mirror.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a sleepy voice.
“Nothing,” he said. But he couldn’t take his eyes off himself. He ran his hands through his hair, staring at his reflection in the mirror. I went back to sleep. In the morning, when I woke up, he was standing there again, playing with his hair, mussing it; trying to get it just right—going for that just-been-fucked look. I guess he thought he was pretty, too.
I saw Warren for the next eight months. I never let myself fall in love with him, but it was fun. He let me be a little girl. And he was a nice daddy. He made me feel loved and important. I knew he was making half a dozen other women feel the same way at the same time—sometimes on the same day, even—but it didn’t matter. I needed lots of nurturing, and I was getting it from Warren Beatty.
The only thing that bothered me was that he never let me photograph him. You’d think he’d love having his picture taken, vain as he was. And he did. But he had to control that, too. I’m sure if Irving Penn had asked him, he would have jumped. But I was just Janice. He needed to be sure he looked perfect. He would have looked perfect in a fucking Polaroid, but that wasn’t enough for Warren. He wanted to look flawless.
I like Warren. I wonder how he feels about getting older. I wonder if he gazes at himself as often as he used to then, or whether he’s had sheets draped over all the mirrors.
THE MUSIC MAN
The month after things with Warren petered out (I use the phrase advisedly), I flew to Los Angeles to do a catalog job for Macy’s. It was fun; I was working with Rene Russo, whom I adore. She’s probably one of the shiest people I’ve ever met, and she said working in front of the camera was sheer torture. She didn’t know who to be when a photographer told her to be herself.
“I’m taking acting classes,” she told me. “It’s so much easier.”
“You must be kidding?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s acting. I find it so much easier to be another person.”
Made all the sense in the world.
The real reason I was so jazzed about being in L.A., however, had nothing to do with the Macy’s shoot. I was jazzed because Peppo della Schiavva had caught wind of my talents as a photographer. Peppo was the Italian publisher who ran most of the fashion magazines in Italy. Bazaar. Men’s Bazaar. Cosmo. He’d asked me to shoot a line of bikinis for him. And who was I to say no? It was my first paying gig on the other side of the camera, and, believe me, I was thrilled to death.
I asked Rene if she could do it, but she had a scheduling conflict. So I tracked down my old pal Bitten, Warren’s little friend. Then I found a local hair and makeup girl and the three of us drove up to Malibu in a rented car. I was distracted the whole way out, trying to remember everything I’d ever learned about photography. I kept making these imaginary lists in my head—things to do and not to do—and the fucking lists were getting so long they were making me dizzy.
But when we got to the beach, I forgot all about the lists. I just stepped up to the plate and felt my way through the shoot. I found I had a good grasp of what would work and what wouldn’t, and the list simply floated out of my head.
We shot for five hours, at a beautiful sandy beach a mile or two north of Malibu. As the day wore on, I became increasingly confident. My best shots—the ones that ended up in print—came toward the end of the day. I remember driving back to L.A. thinking, I’m a photographer!
It was pretty late by the time I returned to my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I showered and ordered room service, thinking about making it an early night. I had another shoot the next day—for Perry Ellis—and I was tired. But I was also wired from working. So I called my friends Elmer Valentine and Lou Adler, who owned two hot clubs on Sunset Strip, the Roxy and On the Rox. Lou was at the latter. He told me to come by.
I put on my micromini, slipped into my platform shoes, and got back into my rental car and drove over. Lou took me into his office and popped some champagne, and we chatted until he got a call to go deal with a problem at the other club. I left his office, buzzed on champagne, and worked my way over to the bar. I didn’t see anyone I knew, but I saw a lot of people I recognized. Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett were there. I remember thinking, People on the West Coast don’t know how to dress. I saw James Taylor. He was sitting at the bar, crying. I’d read in People magazine that Carly Simon had just dumped him.
The song ended. Tina Turner came on, cranking hard. She was impossible to resist. I waltzed out onto the dance floor and shut my eyes and started to boogie. I love dancing with my eyes closed. I can just get down and imagine that I’m there with someone I love. But I sensed someone in my face. And
I knew I wasn’t imagining it. And I wasn’t in love with anyone at the moment. So I opened my eyes.
Mick Jagger was dancing with me. I thought, That champagne Lou gave me—what the hell was it laced with? So I closed my eyes, ignored the apparition, and kept dancing. But it wouldn’t quit. And it felt powerful. I opened my eyes again, and Mick was still in my face. He was no apparition, and he was grinning.
“Who the fuck are you, then?” he said. “I know you.”
“You wish,” I said.
He was pure energy. We danced—cleared the floor—and everyone was staring at us. For a moment there, I went back to thinking that Lou really had laced the champagne. But he hadn’t.
When the music ended, the actual Mick Jagger took me by the actual hand and told me we were going back to the Sunset Marquis. His entourage followed us into the street. That’s the kind of power he had. He moved, and his disciples dropped whatever they were doing and stayed close.
“You’re going back to the Sunset Marquis,” I said, turning to give the valet my parking stub. “I’m going to the Beverly Hills Hotel. I have to work in the morning.”
“Work? Gorgeous girl like you shouldn’t have to work.”
“I like to work,” I said. “It keeps me sane.”
“I know I know you,” he repeated, squinting his eyes and trying to place me.
I offered him my hand. “Janice Dickinson,” I said.
“Mick Jagger,” he said.
“No!” I said. “Really? You’re not putting me on now, are you?”
He laughed. “What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was planning on flying home to New York.”
“Well, don’t,” he said. And he climbed into his limo and disappeared.
Sonofabitch. On the one hand, I was proud of myself. I turned down Mick Jagger. On the other, I felt he could have tried a little harder.
I got back from the Perry Ellis shoot the next afternoon to find my hotel room filled with pink roses. “Someone will be picking you up at seven,” the card said. Mick Jagger, a man of few words?
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