Trashy celebrity bios are usually diminished by the fact that we've already heard the stories about Lonnie and Burt, or Madonna and Sean, or whoever the current target is. Author Stephen Fried manages to get all the sleaze value plus a lot of surprises by choosing supermodel Gia Carangi as his topic. Although her face is widely recognized, Gia finished her modeling career in a blaze of heroin and disease just before the time when models became celebrities with name recognition. Her life is the perfect fodder for the exploitation market, but Fried goes beyond that with fluid prose and a reporter's nose for tracking down sources. His stories about her teenage years, with their mix of late nights in Philadelphia's gay clubs, manic worship, and glam-style imitation of David Bowie, as well as tales of Gia's ability to seduce her friends, male and female, are the product of a lot of work and make for very interesting reading. Gia's unabashed homosexuality and early death from AIDS make her story a palimpsest of life on the edge in the America of the 1980s.


From Publishers Weekly
Charts international cover girl Gia Carangi's descent from $10,000-a-day modeling jobs to heroin addiction and death from AIDS at age 26. Photos. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
One of the biggest "whatever happened to... ?" queries in the fashion world gets answered here, as Fried, a writer for Philadelphia magazine, details the rise (cover of Vogue ) and fall (death by AIDS) of Gia Carangi, a sultry young beauty who shot to prominence--and shot heroin--during the 1970s disco heyday. It's also a big "what if" story: if Gia had not died, Cindy Crawford (dubbed "baby Gia") may not have become the overexposed supermodedel she is today. Fried obviously means Gia's harrowing life to be partly a cautionary tale for all those young girls who wish to be models. However, Gia had many problems (broken home, drug use, confused sexuality) even before she stepped in front of a camera. Fried deridingly describes a 20/20 segment on modeling as "a report meant to detail 'the dark and anxious' side of the modeling business but manages somehow to make the whole enterprise seem extremely glamorous anyway," yet his saga, packed with juicy scoops about other models and photographers, has the same effect. In other words, this book will have a tremendous appeal to a general audience. For all public libraries.- Judy Quinn, formerly with "Library Journal"Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Investigative journalist Fried's biography of model-turned- heroin-addict Gia Carangi is more than your usual riches-to-rags downer, thanks to fascinating fashion-biz detail. Born in Philadelphia to semi-prosperous parents who split up when she was 11, Gia grew up wild. In high school, she dressed flamboyantly (e.g., wearing a quilted red satin jumpsuit and platform boots), smoked pot and swallowed Quaaludes, and was a lesbian and proud of it. After a local fashion photographer took shots of her, Gia, then 18, was offered a contract with a top N.Y.C. modeling agency. Within months of her move to Manhattan, she was being photographed by camera stars like Helmut Newton, Arthur Elgort, and Francesco Scavullo. Her attitude hit the late-70's Zeitgeist dead on: Gia dressed in men's clothes, wore no makeup, and cultivated an authority-be-damned attitude. As one editor put it: ``She had that boy/girl thing, and it was sexy.'' While Gia was late for shoots from the beginning, it was only later that her increasingly bizarre antics revealed that she had a serious heroin problem. In 1981, she moved back to Philadelphia, made various attempts to kick her habit and come back as a cover girl, but was diagnosed as HIV-positive. She died of AIDS in 1986. Fried offers a seamless narrative based on copious research, but, even so, Gia registers here as little more than a shallow kid with natural good looks and a mile-wide self-destructive steak. More rewarding are the highly detailed portraits of supporting players: the photographers, fashion editors, and models whose trajectories of fame coincided with that of the doomed model. A refreshingly undazzled take on the daily workings of the fashion scene. (First serial to Vanity Fair) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
The New York Times Book Review Vivid...The story of Gia Carangi...should be set out among the fashion magazines in modeling agency waiting rooms and any other place where teen-age girls who've been called pretty a little too often hang out...Stephen Fried's exhaustive account of Gia's brief life seems to have an important unanswered quesition on every page: why didn't anyone help Gia?


Book Description
At age seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year, Gia was one of the top models of the late 1970's, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at New York's Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, and redefining the industry's standard of beauty. She was the darling of moguls and movie stars, royalty and rockers. Gia was also a girl in pain, desperate for her mother's approval—and a drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion, who started going directly from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to the heroin shooting galleries on New York's Lower East Side. Finally blackballed from modeling, Gia entered a vastly different world on the streets of New york and Atlantic City, and later in a rehab clinic. At twenty-six, she became on of the first women in America to die of AIDS, a hospital welfare case visited only by rehab friends and what remained of her family. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Gia's gamily, lovers, friends, and colleagues, Thing of Beauty creates a poignant portrait of an unforgettable character—and a powerful narrative about beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.


About the Author
Stephen Fried is a Senior Writer at Philadelphia Magazine. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the Washington Post Magazine. A winner of a 1993 National Magazine Award, the Distinguished Service Award for Magazine Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Clarion Award from Women in Communications, he lives in Philadelphia with his wife Diane Ayres, a fiction writer.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At age seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year, Gia was one of the top models of the late 1970's, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at New York's Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, and redefining the industry's standard of beauty. She was the darling of moguls and movie stars, royalty and rockers. Gia was also a girl in pain, desperate for her mother's approval—and a drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion, who started going directly from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to the heroin shooting galleries on New York's Lower East Side. Finally blackballed from modeling, Gia entered a vastly different world on the streets of New york and Atlantic City, and later in a rehab clinic. At twenty-six, she became on of the first women in America to die of AIDS, a hospital welfare case visited only by rehab friends and what remained of her family.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Gia's gamily, lovers, friends, and colleagues, Thing of Beauty creates a poignant portrait of an unforgettable character—and a powerful narrative about beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly