Thing of Beauty

'A disproportionate number of the people mentioned in the books (or their close associates) had died before I even came to this story. [...]. Many more people died during the course of my research. [...]. On at least five occasions, people who had agreed to speak with me, or were considering my request, died before the interviews could take place.' Stephen Fried

"Usually, when you're in therapy with somebody and they start crying, the therapist can hold it together. Gia's crying... was almost like it could click off other people's crying. It was a deep, sobbing-type cry. She would cry in group and the other women would cry. It was just this immense pain that would just sort of come out, and it would leave a lot of her peers feeling real helpless, like there was nothing you could do to take away all of this. It was like she had tons of bricks on her."

"She said that, when they were on the islands, all the models referred to her as 'Sister Morphine.'"

"Gia was butch in a fashionable way. When she went out, she wore cowboy boots and dungarees instead of Reeboks and khaki pants. With lesbians, ninety percent of them have sneakers on, white sneakers, and little Lacoste shirts. It's rare you meet someone who's feminine and who doesn't fit the image."

"...she drives up, on time, gets out of her car, walks up and sees that there's all this underwear hanging in the van. Vogue had not told her that they wanted to do lingerie: they got her out there under false pretenses. So, she just calmly says to the editor, 'I forgot something in my car,' and she drives back to New York, leaving them all there. I thought that was spectacular."

"God, I don't want to turn Gia into something mythological," said Helen Murray, one of the reigning Vogue assistants in the late seventies, "but I would hear these stories, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who lived vicariously through them. She was doing stuff we all wanted to do but were too afraid to. This spectacular-looking girl who didn't give a shit - I greatly admired the stories I heard about her."

John Garfield was her favorite actor. Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo were her favorite actresses, and she sometimes made a pilgrimage to the building Garbo lived in on East Fifty-second Street to catch a glimpse of the publicly reclusive actress.

"But she had some kind of a real presence, very strong. People say she was really beautiful, I can't say that. She didn't have a great body, didn't have great elegance intrinsically. But then something came through in the pictures. It was like Marilyn Monroe. If you looked at her unsentimentally, Marilyn didn't have a great body at the end, but when she moved or when she... I don't know, but Gia had that same pathetic thing that Marilyn had."

Gia had always loved flowers, so she was happy to jump on the bud bandwagon. "Gia loved roses," Kathleen recalled, "and when she became a model and had all this money to spend, she sent $50-a-dozen roses like it was nothing. She brought me an orchid one time she bought with Scavullo. Her color was yellow, my color was apricot. I still can't see a yellow rose without thinking of her."

"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."

"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 is in so much pain?"

"She had this anger, you know, this tremendous anger."

"Normally, the girls are like 'Fuck me, fuck me, I'll do anything for you.' Gia was just 'fuck you.'"

"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 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."

"'If I look so fucking good why don't you get me a joint?' That was her response to all this poetry..."

"This girl had done everything by the time she was sixteen. She had tried almost every drug, had all kinds of sex, and she was going with a very fast crowd."

"She was really shy and quiet, and she was totally untrusting. She was obviously used to being abused because she was so beautiful. People wanted to be around her because she was so beautiful. They didn't care who Gia was; her mind and her person weren't important to them. It was only important that she was beautiful and she was this thing they could carry around with them."

"Gia always had a question about her sexual preference," Sharon said. "There was always a question in her mind, and she always wished she loved men - it would have made life so much less complicated."

Gia and I revolutionized the gay world in Philadelphia. Before we went out together it was always butch-fem couples where there was one 'masculine' and one 'feminine' girl. We were seen as two fems.