Elyssa Golden

February 27, 1959 – November 25, 1994

Rest In Peace Angel.
I’d like to believe that Gia handed you your wings.

Gia’s long-term girlfriend was Elyssa Golden. She was THE love of Gia’s life according to Gia’s closest friends and family.

Elyssa Golden went by pseudonym “Rochelle Rosen” in the Stephen Fried book “Thing of Beauty”, and “Kimberly Lloyd” in the book “Born This Way” by Sacha Bauman Levin.

Mares Rmo: October 2020, I received an email telling me I may be interested in a post in a forum post. I went to the link and read a heart-breaking post by Elyssa’s sister Steffi.

Mares Rmo: Steffi obviously wants people to know more about her sister than what was written in Thing of Beauty and to stand up for her sister.
The real story is actually a double tragedy of two young ladies leaving this world before their time. Comfort comes in knowing they are together now.

Elyssa’s sister Steffi Golden post October 13, 2020. She wrote: “Why does the media want to push the idea of Sandy being the true love in Gia’s life? In some of those documentaries and talk shows they actually made Gia look desperate going after Sandy all the time. Everyone wants to label Elyssa Golden and Gia’s relationship as a ‘chemical romance’ and make her look like a terrible person, and it’s really hurtful for us that knew them both. They loved each other. Gia herself said Elyssa was THE ONE! Just because two people use drugs doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and Gia was using heroin long before she met Elyssa.”

“My sister came from an upper-class Jewish family and she was a good girl. She was a hard worker, and she was an excellent student. She did party but no more than anyone else did in those days. You have to remember the times. Cocaine wasn’t seen as a destructive drug. Everywhere you looked people were doing coke. Clubs were giving it out for free! Housewives, doctors, and politicians were all doing coke. Elyssa was more in control of her drug use. She used when she partied, but she NEVER had a problem. She was never addicted. She never suffered from her drugs use in any way financially or otherwise.”

“While she was attending college, she met Gia. I know people say they met in rehab and Elyssa was a junkie, but it simply isn’t true. Elyssa was not a model, but she was GORGEOUS for her day. She was 5’3 110lbs of pure joy. Elyssa never met anyone she couldn’t have or anyone that didn’t love her. She was loved by so many and she was full of life and so much fun to be with. Like most girls of the day, she had questions about her sexuality. She had messed around with girls, but she never had a full on relationship with another girl.”

“When she met Gia, she was curious, and Gia was all over her. None of us realized this would be anything more than a fling. We certainly didn’t know that this meeting would destroy so many lives. Shortly after Gia and Elyssa met, things quickly became serious. It was around this time that Gia introduced Elyssa to heroin. After a while Elyssa knew this was going nowhere and would destroy them both. She went to rehab and cleaned herself up, but Gia was always there and couldn’t stop using and Elyssa would relapse. Gia would go to rehab and go away and wind up on Elyssa’s doorstep. She could NEVER turn Gia away. She was so in love with Gia. It was heartbreaking for everyone that was close to them.”

“All we see on forums are stories about Gia and her junkie GF Elyssa.”
“”Elyssa was a person. She was not a footnote in Gia’s story. I don’t care what people say or think, they WERE NOT THERE! When Gia and Elyssa got together Sandy was not a part of Gia’s life anymore. There were many women before Elyssa, but Elyssa was the ONLY woman Gia was ever serious about and it was the same for Elyssa. She lived 9 years beyond Gia’s death and succumbed to aids herself. She got aids from sharing needles with Gia. In those years between she was depressed and missed Gia. She laid in bed curled up with Gia’s clothes and she would just bawl for hours. This went on for a long time.”

“Kathy barred her from seeing Gia at Eagleville and wouldn’t allow her to attend Gia’s funeral. Elyssa had other girlfriends after Gia, and she would have them dye their hair brown and dress like Gia. Her apartment was like a shrine to Gia. She was so incredibly sad and ready to leave the world to be with her again.”

“Her, our family, and her friends went through the same trauma Gia’s did and watched her get eaten alive by aids. In the end she hid herself away in our parent’s attic because she was embarrassed and ashamed of herself because in those days aids was poorly understood and was a gay man’s disease. It wasn’t a disease that upper class white women suffered from. Everyone makes her out to be the villain in this story and Sandy the hero and Sandy has done nothing but perpetuate these stories further. People have taken advantage to spin a narrative because there is no one to refute their stories. I am so sick and tired of reading this garbage. It doesn’t do Gia or Elyssa any justice.”

“Just how Kathy thought Elyssa was a bad influence for Gia… My mother Bonnie felt the same way about Gia corrupting her daughter and destroying her life. My mother never went out publicly and blamed Gia and called her a junkie though.”

“Sandy comes off as an opportunist who makes her relationship with Gia seem more important than it actually was. To actually have the audacity to disparage someone she never knew and talk down on her because she made a mistake and thought it was her in the photo with Gia and her car in the fried book… How petty can you be? My sister was well into her disease when she was asked. Her and Sandy do look similar and the photo was blurry. C’mon! It was published a year before she died!”

“Kathy was no better honestly. She only loved Gia when she was a model and when she was dying. Gia loved her so much but again another love that was unrequited which was the pattern that would follow Gia all of her life until she met my sister. Elyssa never went out of her way to let the world know she was with Gia. Sandy and Kathy basically made a second career out of it.”

“I know I’m not the only that feels this way. Some of Gia’s closest friends feel this way too. There were two worlds… One was Philly and one was NYC and both Gia and Elyssa were a part of both scenes. Sandy did not reciprocate Gia’s feelings when Gia was alive. She only had these strong feelings after she died. You’ll notice there is no one else that can corroborate her stories of this amazing relationship. Good friends maybe but nothing serious from Sandy’s side. When the movie Gia came out… I almost died inside because the narrative it spun was so far from Gia or Elyssa’s real lives and who they truly were. Not once did they ask ANYONE who actually knew them and instead relied on stories from Sandy and Stephen Fried. I’m not trying to bash Sandy, but I am going to defend my sister.”

“Elyssa was the one true love of Gia’s life and vice versa and anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous because Gia said so herself on many occasions including on her death bed.”

“We still have all of Gia and Elyssa’s letters and journals. We also have many of their personal belongings from cleaning out Elyssa’s apartment after she had to move home because she was so sick that she could not work. She never turned Gia away and believe me she was no shrinking violet herself. Gia stole from her, used her and lied to her, physically abused her and cheated on her but she always took Gia back no matter what. They fought like any other couples do. It was a classic toxic relationship, but does that take away the love they shared? No, it doesn’t. When no one else would take Gia in because she had aids… Elyssa put a roof over her head, fed her and clothed her. Gia repaid her by stealing almost everything out of her house, stealing her car and going back to heroin over and over again. People lie and say Elyssa was old, like she was Gia’s sugar-mommy, and she was only with her for her money but that is total BS. They were the same age!”

“It was a toxic relationship at points but at some points it was really good. Elyssa was young, outgoing, vibrant and full of life. Just because she wasn’t a model doesn’t make her life or her story any less important. She wasn’t famous but she was loved by so many. I’m tired of people adding in their own made up BS because she is dead and can’t refute the claims. We do not usually talk about Elyssa because it’s so painful to remember her the way she was at the end of her short life. So much potential lost and for what? Nothing.”

“They were star crossed lovers and that seems romantic but what happened to them was a tragedy of their own making and watching my sister waste away was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I know Gia and Elyssa wouldn’t want people to romanticize their lives or get caught up in the details and miss the bigger picture which was that they were two very young girls that had so much life left to live and had so many things they could’ve done like had children, had amazing careers and shared so many of the wonderful moments they missed out on because of a disease that didn’t discriminate or care about who you were or about your dreams and aspirations and only brought death to everyone it touched robbed them of all of the good things in life. I always wonder where they would be had they lived, and I can’t really say but I am confident they would be together.”

FROM “Born This Way”:

Elyssa was neither a model nor a famous singer, but everyone in Atlantic City knew her.  She wasn’t the kind of woman to spend her evenings at home on the sofa watching rom coms on TV.  She was a party girl, and she loved having a good time.  Lively and quick-witted, her sunny nature matched by the color of her bright blonde hair, Elyssa was Gia’s girlfriend until nearly the very end.  The destinies of the two young women were so inextricable entwined, in fact, that they shared the disease that ultimately killed them both. 

Once Gia was gone, Elyssa tried to move on with her life, but the deep love she had experienced for her “boy”, as she often referred to Gia, never faded.  In the background of her everyday life, which she filled with hopes and plans, Gia was there in the form of memories.  All those memories, perhaps too many to bear, came flooding forward when Elyssa looked at the old photographs that decorated the walls of her apartment.  Gia was still alive in those photos, and in Elyssa’s heart.

Barbara Paladino recalls meeting Elyssa in Atlantic City, where Elyssa worked as a manicurist at a local salon.  “The best salon in the neighborhood”, Paladino recounts.  “She used to manicure my nails.  That’s how I met her.”  The two bonded instantly, and Paladino’s memories of their friendship remain special.

 “We partied a lot together.  We went to clubs, and we did a lot of running around Atlantic City.  We used to go to New York together.  She was a party girl, basically.  She knew a lot of people.  Elyssa was very pushy sometimes, very influential.  She helped get me my job in the casinos when I first moved here.  She was very well liked, and she knew a lot of people in the area.  She was very social.

“I could tell you a lot of cute things about Elyssa.  She loved Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.  That was her thing.  That’s one of the things I remember about her the most.  She did Mick Jagger impersonations, all the time.  She was very trendy, very outgoing.  She was always up for a party, always up for fun.  We spent a lot of time together.  She was a very good friend.”

Paladino recalls how deeply connected Elyssa remained to her former girlfriend in the years after Gia’s death.  “When I met Elyssa, Gia had already passed.”  She had pictures of Gia all over, and she was head over heels!  She would show me pictures, and it seemed like they were inseparable.  Elyssa always wanted Gia to wear white blouses and blue jeans.  When I met her, she used to say to me, ‘You remind me of Gia.  You look like Gia.  You have her dark hair.  You should wear this, you should wear that.”

It’s easy to imagine Elyssa staring out over the ocean from her marvelous apartment, lost in nostalgia as the movement of the waves brought back feelings that had never dimmed.  During the time that Paladino knew her, Elyssa met a new girlfriend and Paladino recalls, “she even made her new girlfriend dye her hair black and wear white blouses and blue jeans.”  In telling Paladino about her relationship with Gia, Elyssa had used one adjective: passionate.  “That’s how she described her love affair with Gia, a passionate love,” Paladino says.  “Actually, Elyssa was very passionate, too.  When she wanted something, boy, she went for it!

Elyssa used to say Gia was very aggressive.  They used to go to Atlantic City a lot and party, and she said Gia started to get into drugs really bad.  Other than that, she used to call Gia her boy, her little boy.  She used to say that Gia just wanted to be loved, to have someone there for her all the time.  Elyssa was that person.  Elyssa would have been that person for anybody she was friendly with, myself included.”

For Paladino, Gia’s attraction for Elyssa was obvious.  “First of all, Elyssa was a cute little blonde and she had a little bit of a tomboy side to her.  She was very protective.  If you were her friend, nobody could hurt you, nobody.  She was very strong.  I think people are drawn to that.  She would do anything for you.  If anyone did something to me, she would tell them right to their face, ‘You’re a piece of shit.  You can’t hurt Barbera.”’

There is one deeply painful memory among Barbera’s collection of pleasant ones, friends were starting to talk about friends who had died after a week of pneumonia.”

Elyssa Golden was also apparently the type of woman who liked to mark her territory, an aspect of Elyssa’s personality that Paladino alludes to when she recalls Elyssa as “very controlling.  She took care of her partners.”  Hairstylist Anthony De May was an unwilling witness to Elyssa’s jealousy.  “I met Elyssa once the year before Gia died,” De May recalls.  “Gia was living in Atlantic City, and I had a summer rental up the New Jersey shore on Long Beach Island.  We would drive down to Atlantic City about midnight on Saturdays and go to the gay clubs scattered along New York Avenue.  One night, I noticed Gia there, who at that point had cut her hair into a short mullet.  She was wearing old jeans and a man’s white shirt, and she was dancing by herself, in her own world, and I thought to myself, I wonder if anyone realizes that Gia, supermodel of the world, is here, just blending in?  So I stepped onto the raised dance floor and shimmied over to Gia.  She had that sort of shocked-slash-bemused reaction of seeing a familiar face in and unexpected place.  We started to dance together, getting close, but not sexual.  I realized she was really high.  She wasn’t even going to attempt to talk, but she was communicating through her eyes.  I knew Gia, so I wasn’t going to ruin her buzz.  Suddenly, the girlfriend Elyssa comes up to us and pushes me away as if I was trying to flirt with her.  The last thing I wanted was to get roughed up by a girl, so I left the dance floor, feeling a quiet rage, and that was the last time I saw Gia alive.”

By chance, Schiavo had also met Elyssa in a New York Avenue club in Atlantic City.  It was in the summer of 1978, years before De May’s encounter.  “At the time, Elyssa was also a pretty blonde girl,” Schiavo recalls.  “She was a cute girl, all smiles.  She had a good personality.  I think she was hanging out at the Chester, an Atlantic City club that was the rage among both gay folks and hip, discriminating heterosexuals with a group of friends of mine from Philly.”  Elyssa was known for being in the company of pretty young women, and Schiavo remembers one in particular, “a beautiful girl named Julianne (not her real name).  Julianne was straight, but I think now and then she had something with Elyssa.  These girls were far from typical lesbian girls.  They were all attractive, sexy.  It was the age of disco.”

Rob Fay: Because of Gia and Elyssa Golden’s shared drug use, some people tried to diminish the bond between them by labeling it a “chemical romance”.  Rob Fay couldn’t disagree more.

Rob:  Contrary to whatever anybody else seems to think, Elyssa was THE love of Gia’s life.  Gia told me that.  I met Elyssa a couple of times, and they were just as close as you can imagine.  I got a very good vibe from Elyssa.  She was very womanly, very friendly.  They cared about each other.

“Gia’s relationship with Elyssa, of course, couldn’t continue unless both of them got on the right path. “They both had the disease of the addiction, and that can be a brutal thing, especially between two people,” Fay adds. “I know how Gia felt about her relationship with Elyssa, and I knew that Gia knew it was the end of the relationship unless Elyssa was going to get clean, too. Even if she had, it would have taken a long time for them to repair the damage they had done.”

FROM “Thing of Beauty”:

1982, Summer ~ Dawn Koss, a friend of Elyssa’s, comes by for a visit. Dawn brings her friend Gia with her. Dawn and Gia had modeled together for Gimbels as teens.
Elyssa meets Gia the first time. Gia was already a heroin addict.

Elyssa recalls “She walked in with Gia, who was wearing a black motorcycle jacket, a white T-shirt, blue Levis and white hi-top Cons (before it was stylish), and she had a Heineken in her hand.  I almost passed out.  I was going through the dilemma of sex at that time, and I had never come into contact with anybody who was that stereotypically homosexual.  Then after meeting her, I walked into Green’s Drug store and there was a stack of Cosmopolitans and I looked, and it was that girl who was in my house.  You could see it was her face.  The whole thing just turned my head, and I’m not the kind of person who’s easily awed.”

“When we met she had already been taking heroin and had been through twenty-one-day detox.  Gia had what they call a ‘bubblegum habit’ because she was able to detox in twenty-one-days.  She was trying to stay clean.” When Gia moved back to her Mother’s house, Gia and Elyssa began seeing a lot more of each other (Spring 1983).

Fall 1983, Gia moved in with her father and Michael, taking a bedroom in the apartment they shared near Hoagie City—at Tennessee and Pacific, just above Caesar’s. Gia convinces Elyssa to move in.

Gia’s plan was that she and Elyssa would have the kind of stable, homey life that she had wanted with many women, but had never been able to experience. “Gia was like an Italian guy from the old school,” Elyssa recalled. “For a while she really even dressed like a guy, even wearing boxer shorts. And she wanted a sort of old-fashioned relationship. She wanted to make me a ‘nice girl’—and I wasn’t.

I never knew what love was, or good sex was. Gia was a great lover. And she wanted to live together in a husband-and-wife type of thing. I was the wife. She was the dominant one. She was the man. I mean, it was really, just pretend. I mean, I was pretending. Maybe she was serious. “But she was also just like a child. She called me ‘Doodiekins,’ I was Mrs. Doodiekins, she was Mr. Doodiekins. I’d boss her around and she’d say, ‘Yes, King Doodoo.’ ‘Gia, go get me some tea, get me a coke.’ Any hour of the morning, she’d go. She’d just wait on me, she was good like that. But, like a child, she’d get all excited about things like Dairy Queen. I’d say, ‘You want some ice cream?’ and she got all excited. ‘Can we really go to Dairy Queen, really?’”

Elyssa: “I remember this one night, I was staying with this guy, the one whose window Gia had jumped through.  He was out, I was just home watching TV in my robe.  All of a sudden, Gia comes climbing through his window in a Ralph Lauren tuxedo and black cowboy boots, fully made up with her hair long.  She said ‘C’mon I want to take you out to dinner.’  I looked at her in this tuxedo and I just said, ‘Gia, you’re out of your mind, it’s done, it’s over.’  She said c’mon, c’mon.  She talked me into it.”

1983, While Gia was trying to keep what was left of her career afloat in New York, she quietly enrolled in an outpatient program in West Philadelphia.  Program Counselor:  “She came with a young lady, a short blonde (Elyssa).  They seemed like they were both coming down of a high.  The girl seemed really loyal to Gia.  She might have been the motivating factor for her coming in.  We felt that the girl was either a committed friend, or someone who was there because of Gia’s fame and was attempting to be a loyal friend.  Gia seemed to have poor family support, so this was somebody who showed her some sort of caring.”

Nancy Adams:  “It was Elyssa over the years who was keeping Gia out of alleys and trash cans and all the other things that could’ve happened.”

In “Thing of Beauty” Appendix Names & Fates: Stephen Fried writes:  “As of this writing, Elyssa Golden is battling liver cancer.  When I did the interviews for this book, she was still living and working at the Jersey Shore; she had a new long-term lover and her biggest health concerns had been alleviated by consistently negative HIV tests.  She has now moved back in with her parents and is receiving aggressive medical treatment.”

Mares Rmo: We now know that Elyssa had AIDS, and didn’t share that information, which was her right.
Quite notably, Elyssa used pseudonyms for her name in her interviews. She never sold her story.
She did not gleam the limelight.
What happened to her was a tragedy too. She not only died of AIDS, but of a broken heart.

I hope this page does justice to Elyssa. I hope her friends and family like the way it turned out.
Please feel free to CONTACT me.