THING OF BEAUTY: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia. By Stephen Fried. Pocket Books. $22. 392 pp.
Before the modeling world had a Cindy Crawford, there was Gia Maria Carangi, whose meteoric rise as a supermodel during the late ’70s was almost as quick as her descent into oblivion.
A Philadelphia high school student at 16, a top model at 18 and a victim of AIDS at 26, Carangi set a new look for high-fashion models. Her rebellion against the fashion industry and modeling, her drug use and her lesbianism were notorious.
Today, everyone seems to know who Crawford is — media darling, Blockbuster representative, wife of Richard Gere. But Gia — who went by her first name only — is all but forgotten by everyone but industry insiders.
This well-researched biography by Philadelphia journalist Stephen Fried does justice to Gia’s short, sad life. This is no cheap indictment of the fashion industry and its treatment of people as objects, especially things of beauty (that’s fodder for a separate book). Nor is it a judgmental glimpse at a wild girl whose fame and money made her even wilder.
Instead, Fried approaches this book with the objectivity of a journalist and the passion of a biographer who has come to know his subject better than many of Gia’s family and friends did. Fried lets us get to know a young woman who apparently never connected totally with anyone in her life, except through her Dior and Armani ads and her layouts in Cosmopolitan and Vogue.
Gia’s life emerges not so much as a tragedy as a loss, a real waste. At the height of her career she was making $100,000 a year; but she often spent $2,000 to $3,000 a day in drugs, usually bought at the low-life shooting galleries in New York City. She died in 1986, indigent, on medical assistance. She was one of the first women in the United States to die from AIDS, which was probably a result of her intravenous drug use.
Although dysfunctional has become a cliche in describing problem families, it seems to fit Gia’s upbringing perfectly. Kathleen Carangi, Gia’s mother, walked out on her older, abusive husband when Gia was 11, leaving her daughter and two sons with their father. His way of dealing with his children was to ignore them, preferring to give them things rather than attention, or to be the strict disciplinarian. Gia learned to use her parents against each other, moving from one to the other’s house after her mother’s remarriage.
When her mother initially deserted the family, Gia was devastated, and the fact that she never could seem to please her mother was a recurring theme throughout her life. Her sexual orientation was distasteful to Gia’s mother, now named Kathleen Sperr, and many of Gia’s friends say she began modeling in an effort to get her mother to accept her homosexuality.
Sperr, who first suggested Fried do a biography on her daughter, is one of the most puzzling people in Gia’s life, and the author does not flinch in his reports. Sperr ignored Gia as a child, yet became a virtual groupie when Gia became a top model, driving to New York City just to do Gia’s laundry if she requested it. Sperr was fascinated by the glamorous industry, eager for the inside gossip; she lived vicariously through Gia. That is why it’s hard to believe that Sperr could be so blind to Gia’s obvious out-of-control drug use.
Gia began using drugs as a teen-ager, graduating to harder drugs as her salary grew. Her trips, food and clothes were provided free of charge. She spent her own money on gifts, a fancy car and lots of drugs. One photo session was stopped because blood was running down Gia’s arm — she had injected herself during the shoot. During a Vogue layout, Gia’s needle marks were visible even after airbrushing. She once became so bored waiting for temperamental photographer Richard Avedon to begin a session that she climbed out the window in the clothes she was to model.
Eventually, her drug antics would get her blackballed by the industry. Yet, the look she was famous for would continue to influence. When Crawford got her start, she was nicknamed “Baby Gia,” and makeup artists and photographers purposely would style her to look like her visual prototype.
Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia could easily have been a sleazy, gossipy book. Instead, it takes an unsentimental look at modeling and the drug culture associated with the Beautiful People in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Fried doesn’t try to shock us, but he paints a comprehensive, interesting portrait of the bad girl of fashion who loved to shock us.
— Oline H. Cogdill is a copy editor on the Features Desk.
