Free Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Page A

Poconos to get away and entertain friends—“a party house,” they called it. They learned the hard way what could happen if they went to the cabin for the weekend and left Gia by herself. One Saturday evening they called home at midnight to make sure Gia was in, and got no answer. Kathleen convinced Henry that they had to drive home immediately, and when they pulled up to their duplex two hours later, Gia was nowhere to be found. But some guy whom Gia had come home with from Oz—a Center City gay club with a Judy Garland theme—had just finished emptying their home of its valuables. The guy, a friendly Oz Quaalude connection in his mid-twenties, had apparently fallen victim to his own fare. Before getting away from the house with Kathleen’s jewelry and some rare coins, he had passed out on the front lawn—where he still was when the Sperrs, and then the police, arrived. When Gia returned home about five A.M . and saw her stepfather’s car, she took off.
    Kathleen and Henry assumed that Gia ran away because she was afraid of getting into trouble. But Gia later confided to a friend that she had been very messed up on Quaaludes and the guy had “taken advantage of her.”
    After that incident, Gia started coming along more often to the cabin. She could bring a friend, but she had to come.Downtown Stroudsburg on a Saturday afternoon did not exactly hold the mystique of Sansom Village, but Gia would often invite Karen along and they would make the best of it: frightening the townspeople with their hair, smoking a couple of joints to make the day a little more amusing, eating whatever was edible in the pizza joints and diners and seeing whatever was at the one movie theater. When they returned to the cabin, they were often confronted with a scene that they might have considered wild and wonderful if it wasn’t populated by …
parents.
Everyone was drunk or getting there, grown men were groping grown women. The sexual revolution had reached the suburbs—wide sideburns, see-through blouses, leisure suits and medallions. And
they
complained that the Bowie kids looked weird.
    At one such weekend party, Gia was introduced to a client of Henry’s, a bachelor lawyer named Meyer Siegel. He said that Gia looked like she might be able to model. That was high praise, because Meyer had a reputation for always dating pretty models and stewardesses. He suggested that Kathleen have some pictures taken of Gia and recommended Joe Petrellis, a well-known commercial photographer in Center City. Petrellis shared Siegel’s interest in “magnificent women.” They had been bachelor buddies for years until Meyer sent the photographer a girl named Patty Herron, whom he not only photographed but eventually married—ending his single life at the age of forty-six.
    Petrellis was a heavyset, handsome man with a studio decorated with antiques he had personally and painstakingly refinished. Fashion photography was what he loved doing best, but the demand for it had dwindled. The local department stores started doing their own work in-house. The city had just a handful of major clothing manufacturers and only one magazine,
Philadelphia
, that published the low-paid editorial fashion pictures that helped photographers get more lucrative display advertising and catalog work. And there were always newer, younger, cheaper photographers vying for those jobs. Petrellis didn’t want to move to New York, where most of the better national jobs were: he had worked to become an above-average fish in America’s fourth- or fifth-largest pond, and he wasn’t interested in starting from scratch. So he began taking pictures of accident scenes forlocal law firms that billed the costs of the massive enlargements to their clients. And he was doing model portfolios for cash.
    Petrellis rarely did free test shootings with prospective models anymore. That was how very young or very successful photographers, each with a continual need for fresh faces, found new