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Doing the job and making everyone else look good because she showed up was the norm for Patti Hansen. Not so for Gia Carangi, a bisexual drug addict whose brief rise, long fall, and final death from AIDS were the subject of a book, Thing Of Beauty, that infuriated models, who say she was hardly representative. "Gia walked in and walked out," says [Kay] Mitchell, [a Vogue rep.] who booked her as well. "The difference between her and models like Patti or Shaun Casey is that they worked for years. They'd go anywhere and do anything for work."
For a moment Gia was a star, though, working with all the best photographers. "Gia was a real mess," says Bill Weinberg. "A trashy little street kid, not unlike Janice Dickinson. If she didn't feel like doing a booking, she didn't show up." Gia hit quickly after arriving in New York. "She was about melancholy and darkness, and that made great pictures," says a fellow model. But it didn't make Gia any happier. At a shoot for Vogue she stumbled out of the dressing room in a Galanos gown, collapsed in a chair and nodded out, blood streaming down her arm, right in front of Polly Mellen. Weinberg told Francesco Scavullo that Gia had become unreliable, but the photographer insisted she'd show up if she knew the booking was with him. Gia always showed up for him. "Frank called up raving and screaming," Weinberg recalls wryly. Gia never arrived. "She would have been a casualty in any life," says John Warren. After several comeback attempts Gia fell out of modeling and died in 1986.
[Bitten] Knudsen: "Gia was my best girlfriend. She was just beautiful. When she was first starting out, we did a job in the south of France with Helmut Newton. He said, 'Throw on the red lips and the bad eyes!' Helmut had Gia and I be girls, and the two other models were dressed as guys. One of them was Swedish and she'd been a real bitch to me when I was starting out. So Gia sent roses to her room with lipstick all over the card, and then she called and said, 'Let's have some fun.' The girl broke out in a rash. Gia and I were like lion cubs having fun. We got a reputation because we didn't hide anything. We did a lot of drugs and went to a lot of parties. So many! We were both constantly on trips, which I think saved my life, because you don't do drugs when you travel. Except when I traveled with Gia. We brought a whole medicine kit. Gia was the peak. She pushed the borders right to death."
The latest topic of conversation in modeling is the resurgence of drugs - particularly heroin - among a clique of models who, in macabre homage, reportedly call themselves Gia's Girls, in honor of Gia Carangi ...