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.

Reviews

``Gia'' Marie Carang (1960-1986) hit the fashion world like a storm in the late 1970s, after she was discovered by model agent Wilhelmina Cooper; soon she was pictured on the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan , delighting photographers with her androgynous look. Relying on interviews with Gia's family and friends, freelance writer Fried details her meteoric rise and tragic fall into drug addiction and death from AIDS. Although Gia lived an independent life as a teenager, dividing her time between the Pennsylvania homes of her estranged parents and openly conducting love affairs with other young women, she evidently could not cope with the stresses of success. Fried brings to life the drug-drenched milieu of the 1980s fashion industry, but fails to dig beneath the flamboyant, rebellious attitude Gia presented to the world to provide insight into her character--although he does convey her troubled relationship with her mother. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)

"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?

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''