Free Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Page B

girls and experimented with new techniques. The photographers were paid in loyalty and other more personal tokens of a model’s gratitude, an occasional model agency finders’ fee, and, once in a while, a terrific picture; the girls got shots for their portfolios that made them look sort of like models. But Petrellis could no longer afford to do free tests, for both professional and personal reasons—his time was too valuable and the temptations too great. Now he charged $850 for a session and eight finished photographs. Beauty was suggested, but not required. Once in a while he came across a girl worth recommending to an agency. But, as he would bitterly point out, as soon as anyone he “discovered” found any measure of success, she promptly forgot that she was from Philadelphia and had ever known a Joe Petrellis. Meyer Siegel arranged for Gia to be photographed as a favor to him. “I think Meyer sent me a few hundred dollars as a present,” Petrellis recalled. “He didn’t have to.”
    The night before the session, Gia and some friends spent the evening at Oz and came home on the El a little after three A.M . “I remember she called her mom when we got off the train and said she was sleeping at my house,” recalled one friend. “She said she had to go get pictures taken at nine-thirty the next morning. I said, ‘Why don’t you just go later,’ and she said her mom had paid for the pictures. What I found unusual about it was that she had left this little bottle of pink L’Oréal Color-Wash at my house. She
never
wore makeup like that, not the Gia I knew.”
    The sessions, one indoors and one outside, produced dozens of uninspired and uninspiring photos of a gangly fourteen-year-old with a forced smile and a hairstyle that, no matter how skillfully manipulated, would never pass for ladylike. Gia looked presentable if uncomfortable in women’s clothes, and her awkwardly posed bikini shots revealed spindly arms, small breasts, chubby thighs and a broad bottom: a typicalmodel’s figure only from the waist up. Nothing about the pictures was reminiscent of the shots in the
Vogues
and
Harper’s Bazaars
that filled her mother’s coffee tables, except they were of a girl and they were in the kind of sharp focus that only professional cameras and lighting could consistently produce.
    But the process of being photographed interested Gia. Mostly, she liked cameras, and was fascinated by the technical aspects of what was going on. She also didn’t mind the attention being focused on her. She liked that Petrellis told her she was pretty good at modeling. Even under the raccoonlike makeup job, there was a little something in her eyes that was catching the camera’s attention.
    And in nearly every shot, her eyes were wide open. She already knew not to flinch when exposed to the harsh light.

3
Suffragette City
    W hen the announcement came over WMMR-FM, word spread through the Bowie community like a batch of bad hair dye. The T. Rex show scheduled for the Tower Theater was canceled. Ticket holders could get a refund at the box office or, for an extra dollar, could trade in the tickets for the same seats to see David Bowie, who was coming out of retirement to support a new record.
    Diamond Dogs
was to be the turning point in Bowie’s career. Renaming 1974 “The Year of the Diamond Dogs” was part of the campaign by Bowie’s management to explain his formative year away from performing and to sell his new image. Bowie wasn’t going to be Ziggy Stardust anymore. He was going to throw a wrench into the time-honored machinery of pop stardom by splitting with his past image and repositioning himself as a musical chameleon, a pretentious changeling with no real identity beyond the parts he played and the costumes he wore. The futuristic hell portrayed in the lyrics and on the album cover suggested a reason for throwing Ziggy to the dogs: the decadent life of rock stardom had destroyed his sensibilities. Luckily, the