[regarding Gia's childhood]

Gia was a quiet, bright child whose mannerisms were so adorable that she was encouraged to speak in baby talk long after it was appropriate. She was precocious and quietly rebellious, and if she had a truly close bond with anyone in the family, it was with her mother, with whom she could share "girl things." ... Gia's childhood was strongly influenced by an event that took place when she was five: She was sexually abused by an older man. The abuse occurred once, but she was traumatized by the incident and lived in fear that it would happen again. By the time Gia was nine or ten, the tension in the Carangi household had escalated from verbal abuse to violence. While none of the children were ever hit, the parents began to tangle on a fairly regular basis. Finally, Kathleen (Gia's mother) decided to take the unusual step of leaving her husband, her home, AND her children for another man. Later, both parents remarried and shared custody, but in many ways, Gia never got over the temporary loss of her mother.
"Gia did a lot of things just to get her mother's attention," says one friend. "She and Kathleen had this ongoing battle, and the one person Gia always wanted something from was her mother -- and in her own way, she just never felt like she got it."

At that time, there was perhaps only one facet of Gia Carangi's life with which she seemed comfortable: her homosexuality. "She was the purest lesbian I ever met," recalls another friend. "It was the clearest thing about her. And she was very aggressive about it. She was sending other girls flowers and poems when she was fourteen years old." Her mother says that Gia was not gay, but "lived the gay life-style."

"Gia just loved women, and she fell for them whether they were straight or gay," says one high school friend. "And the problem was that everyone fell in love with her, whether they were straight or not, male or female. She went after people and she always got them."

Many of her friends believe that the biggest reason Gia gravitated toward modeling was that she thought it would satisfy her mother on a number of levels: It was a professional "direction", it was the kind of "girl thing" the two had always shared, and it was a vicarious fantasy for her mother. "She knew her mother wanted her to be a model," says one friend. "And she knew it was her destiny. I think she knew that she could go to New York anytime and make it big."

[regarding her modeling career]
Just after her 18th birthday, in January of 1978, Gia was signed by Wilhelmina Models, in New York.

"Gia hated the business from the beginning," [says Gia's female lover of the time], "She felt like a piece of meat. I know it's an old cliché, but that's what she always said."

Over the next 6 months, Gia was doing Bloomingdale's ads and Vogue layouts with Arthur Elgort, Italian Bazaar editorial spreads in Rome with Chris von Wangenheim, and Cosmo covers with Scavullo. Her makeup was being done by the two best in the business, Sandy Linter and Way Bandy, and her hairstylist was invariably the legendary Harry King. It happened so fast that she didn't have time to be awed. She was being booked by the top photographers and modeling the work of the top fashion designers before she really even knew who they were or how to spell their names.

Although Gia's modeling was going fantastically, she did not immediately create much of a personal support system for herself in New York. Gia's mother came to visit her in New York as often as she could, sometimes just to do the laundry. But much of the time, Gia was alone. She tried to get involved in some activities outside of modeling. But she couldn't find time in her schedule. She would become professionally friendly with makeup artists Way Bandy and Sandy Linter, as well as with models Juli Foster, Janice Dickenson and Bitten -- and there were some former Philadelphians and current drug connections who came in and out of her life -- but she spent a lot of time, if not by herself, certainly alone. "The biggest mistake we made was that nobody went up there with her," says her brother Michael. "She could've used a friend."

She was lonely but growing wealthy. Gia made more than one hundred thousand dollars a year during her first two full years of modeling. A Wilhelmina spokesman told one magazine writer that Gia was expected to make closer to five hundred thousand dollars in 1980, her 3rd year. But that wildly successful third year was not to be, because by that time, Gia was in terrible trouble with drugs. And everyone around her knew it ...

"Those days, everyone had this idea that being a junkie was very glamorous." Within 2 years of coming to New York, Gia had a drug problem. Gia's drug use prevented her from working at anything close to her full capacity as a model. She changed agencies twice -- All the dues she had paid doing editorial layouts and covers - which could lead to advertising contracts - were becoming largely meaningless as word began to spread that Gia was using heroin and could no longer be counted on to deliver the version of herself that photographers and clients had grown to love.

[In 1981] Gia was arrested -- for driving under the influence of a narcotic. That spring she made one of her partial comebacks, returning to the business with a new determination to use her modeling career as a stepping stone to TV commercials and acting. In April, she did the taping for the 20-20 segment on modeling, which she hoped would accelerate the process by which anonymous beautiful models become household names. In May Gia required surgery on her hand because she had injected herself in the same place so many times that there was an open, infected tunnel leading into her vein. After the surgery, she still modeled sporadically, but her moods were swinging wildly. Over the next few months, things fell apart again. She walked out on shootings, fell asleep during jobs, and refused to get help or even admit she had a problem. By the time the 20-20 program finally aired [on TV], it was more of a sad joke in the industry than a boost for Gia's career. She was in the process of being blacklisted from her agency ...

"Those years were just unbelievable," her mother recalls. "I told my ex-husband that he should be prepared for any news, because she was capable of anything. People in that situation will do anything for drugs -- hook, steal. --- I knew that any day I could get a call and she'd be dead."

By December [1984] Gia had reached --- rock bottom. After pressure -- from her family, Gia finally entered a rehab program. She had herself declared indigent so that welfare would pay for the treatment. Gia left rehab in the summer of 1985. She -- increased her use of heroin. [In 1986 she ended up in a hospital] with symptoms of pneumonia. Her blood tests also showed she had ARC, a precursor to AIDS. Gia Carangi would live only six months more ...

In October, Gia was hospitalized with multiple symptoms stemming from AIDS. Rob Fay [Gia's close friend during her forays into Rehab programs] remembers those last weeks vividly. Even the counseling Gia had sent him to for friends and relatives of people with AIDS didn't prepare him for the horror and the quickness of her demise. "She had wanted to make a couple of videos addressing children," he says. "And I never went and got a video camera. We just put it off and put it off and then she was in the hospital. What she wanted was for kids to see what drugs can do. She wanted to tell kids, ya know, that you don't have to do this."

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