Interview from: “Born This Way: Friends, Colleagues, and Coworkers Recall Gia Carangi, the Supermodel Who Defined an Era” by Sacha Lanvin Baumann.
In 1980, model Bob Menna flew to Barbados to do a shoot for GQ with Arthur Elgort. Bob: “It was the first time I met Gia. In fact, I hadn’t heard of her before then. I really didn’t keep up with the industry, and rarely picked up a magazine.”
“I got to the location a couple of days before shooting was supposed to start. I was sitting in the house on that first day with a group of other models. This girl poked her head in the door, viewed all the models, and then looked over at me. I must have raised an eyebrow or something. Maybe my mouth was wide open, but she looked at me with this quizzical look. When I caught my breath, I said ‘Hi, why don’t you come in?’”
”It’s difficult to describe the beauty I saw in her. There was something in her that was sort of like Lauren Bacall in “To Have and Have Not”. The thick mane of tousled hair, cigarette in her hand, she really didn’t look like the typical model of the day. No makeup, her clothes looked like they were just thrown on or that she’d been wearing them all her life. That’s how comfortable and confident she looked. To say I was attracted would be an immense understatement.”
“She came in and sat down right next to me. I can still recall her scent today, not perfume but a musky sensual smell. She was acting kind of tough, bold, rebellious. All this took place in just a few moments. I forget my exact words, but they were something to the effect of, ‘Just because you’ve taken my breath away, that doesn’t mean you have to try and intimidate me, because I don’t intimidate easily.’ Now her mouth was open. She said ‘What?’ and I said ‘Look, why don’t we get out of here and go down to the beach?’”
“We walked down to the beach about a mile away, I lit up a joint ass soon as we left the house, and we smoke and walked and got to know each other. Turns out we were both street kids from the city, and the fact that I had called her on her attitude gained me respect. She let me know that.”
“She already had my respect for not being a typical model, for her obvious street smarts, and for being completely without pretension. So, just when I was thinking ‘What a lucky guy I am to be here in this beautiful place with this beautiful woman,’ we broke through the woods to the path that lead to the beach. As soon as she saw the water, she started to disrobe as she walked, and this time my mouth hit the ground. I watched her continue on to the water thinking ‘God must have heard me. I’m truly in paradise.’
“As she got to the water’s edge, I saw that there was darkness in the water. I shouted, ‘Gia! Stop!’ just as she started going in. It was full of sear urchins. She came hopping out on one foot, naked as the day she was born. I helped her back on the beach, but we were in the middle of nowhere, and no one was around. I had no idea where town was and there was no sign of civilization. I took a look at her foot, and the spines had fortunately no gone in deep. I found a bottle, broke it, sterilized it with my lighter, and begin to operate to remove the spines. She was lying back on her elbows all this time, not saying much, no cries of pain, no panic. I couldn’t believe how calm she was.”
“Once the spines were out, I needed to clean the wounds and had nothing to do it with. As a surfer, I knew urine was the appropriate antiseptic in these situations, but I was thinking, ‘How am I going to tell this girl who I met less than an hour ago that I have to pee on her foot?’ Before I just pulled it out and did the deed, I looked around for another bottle. I found one, and I explained to her what I was going to do. Now she was the one raising her eyebrows …. As I was pouring the content of the bottle over her foot, all the while looking up at her resting on her elbows and admiring her nakedness, she shook her head in a kind of disapproving way and she said, “That’s not the way James Bond did it!’ Gia had recalled the famous scene from the 1965 James Bond film, “Thunderball”, when Sean Connery bites a sea urchin spine from Claudine Auger’s foot.”
“As I finished pouring out the last drops, I said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. We can do James later!’ Really, that’s how I met Gia. Perhaps it’s a little like the story of Androcles and the Lion. For me, she was tamed. From that moment on, it was like we had known each other eternally. When we got to the set of the shoot, most of the time we were hardly aware of Arthur being there. One of the things I have always admired about Arthur’s work is his ability to capture moments in time that are as much documentary as they are fashion photos.”
Bob remembers Gia not solely as a “unique beauty”, but as a “real straight shooter”. “She was no nonsense. She put it all out on the table. She had a lust for life and a magnetic personality. Her ability to be herself in front of the camera was what I thought made her so special. I Think she enjoyed the travel, the money, but I think she shunned the notoriety and being fussed over. I never saw her in a diva moment like many of the other girls. I always got the feeling that modeling wasn’t the be-all, end-all for her. That if she fell from grace, she would be happy returning to a ‘regular’ life. Another thing we had in common was that neither of us had aspirations to be a model. We both sort of fell into it. With me, my first job landed a GQ cover, so there was no struggling after that.”
Bob never observed Gia in difficulty in her interactions with other. “If she didn’t take to you, she wouldn’t fake it, so in that sense some people might have seen it as difficulty interacting. I saw it as a sign of strength. My suspicion is that what others might have seen as difficulties were more just her preferences. Her lust for life, her non-conformity, her rebellious attitude, that’s what makes her so memorable, and wonderfully so. Most of us conform to society’s norms or spend our time trying to change the society we live in, but that wasn’t a necessity for her. I believe people vicariously want to have a bit of what she had. She had the ability to leave a small part of herself with everyone who came in contact with her. I know she did for me.”
“We were all using drugs in those days, it came with the territory. I never thought of her as having any mental or emotional problems, but then again when we were together, it was just the two of us. We never argued. I never saw any mood swings. She was constant and consistent with me. Ours was a physical, sensual relationship, yet we both knew and both understood that didn’t mean we didn’t care for each other. One cute thing I remember is that often in intimate moments, or when we were around others and she felt like showing some affection without it being known, she would call me James. We loved each other in our own way. We never said ‘I love you’ to each other, but we never needed to.”
“One summer, back in the eighties, I volunteered as a manager at Bailey House, a residence in the Village for homeless people suffering from AIDS, so that the managers could take vacations. During that time, I saw first-hand the fear, loss of dignity, and personal suffering of those who contracted the disease and the effects on their family and friends as well. I’ve blocked all of that out with regard to Gia so that my internal memories of her can remain untarnished. In remembering this, I realize that, while I might have covered it up, it wasn’t really as blocked out as I thought. She was a wonderful, beautiful girl, and I still to this day have trouble coming to terms with the fact that her light is no longer with us.”
