Thing of Beauty (9 page)

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 album
Diamond Dogs
had a few catchy tunes among the dystopian posturing: “Rebel, Rebel” was Bowie’s most radio-ready hit yet.

Bowie was now big enough to play to sold-out stadiums: under normal circumstances, he would have been expected
to play the cavernous Spectrum. But as a gesture to his Philadelphia fans, he had instead decided to play the smaller Tower Theater for as many nights as he could sell out.

The Bowie fans camped out for several days for tickets. In the year since Bowie’s last appearance, there had been many converts: the outdoor slumber party became a sort of family reunion for people who never knew they were related. It was also, for the uninitiated, a major rite of passage. The older fans tried to scare off the kids with a special harassment technique. “They called it ‘reading you for filth,’” recalled one ticket camper. “We’d protect the younger kids in line. They would torment them, dare them to do drugs, tease them with lots of sexual innuendo.” Another ticket-line veteran remembered a Bowie-nut removing her in-use tampon and throwing it at one of the kids. “I think they had seen too many John Waters movies,” he laughed.

The night of the second show, Karen put on the outfit she had been planning for months: the tightest jeans she could find, a glitter tube top and silver, glittery, four-inch-high platform shoes. She knew she was bucking the Bowie dress code, which had been established when David stunned the first-night audience with an entirely new look. Instead of glitter clothes, he appeared in baggy pleated trousers, suspenders, a white cotton shirt and black ballet shoes. His hair was slicked straight back. Karen heard that during opening night intermission—a theater convention rarely used at rock concerts—the scene in the bathrooms was frantic. Some glitter boys and girls hurriedly altered their outfits, wetting down their spiked hair, rubbing off their makeup lightning bolts and rolling down their pants legs.

Gia, of course, had been on top of the new Bowie look for months, since
Diamond Dogs
was originally released. She went to the show in what had become her new uniform: a white T-shirt, patch-pocket fatigues, heavy boots and a red beret from the I. Goldberg Army-Navy store. And no makeup.

Passing through the crush of weird-looking people outside the Tower, who had managed to turn the blue-collar Upper Darby neighborhood into a Bosch painting, Gia and Karen went in to take their seats. But the ushers said there was a
problem. Extra sound equipment had been brought in at the last minute and a mixing board now sat where they were supposed to: fans would later find out that the shows were being taped for a double live album. As a way of apologizing for the inconvenience, management had arranged for the displaced fans to sit in the orchestra pit. Down front If they had ever needed a sign that their love of Bowie was divinely ordained, this was it.

As the lights went down, all eyes were directed to the stage, where Bowie appeared with two male dancers on leashes, dancing on all fours. He sang “1984” while spotlights revealed the show’s elaborate set, a Broadway-on-acid display that redefined the parameters of rock spectacle. In the front rows, the Bowie kids began the frenzied process of getting David’s attention: waving signs, flashing breasts, tossing flowers and notes onstage, or just staring intently at his face, hoping to catch his eye when he scanned the throng. Ownership of those passing glances was hotly contested—glitter girls would argue between songs, “He looked at me,” “No, he looked at me”—and if David actually read your sign out loud or acknowledged your offering, status was immediately conferred.

As the second half of the show came to a close, Bowie shocked the crowd by doing an encore, something he generally avoided: the hardcore Bowie fans took it as a personal gift, something they had willed by their own enthusiasm. About halfway through the song, Gia grabbed Karen’s hand and dragged her out the side exit of the theater and around back. As Bowie shuffled out the stage door and slid into his waiting limo, Gia vaulted over the yellow police barricade and leaped onto the hood of the car, face against the windshield. Bowie slunk down into the back seat as Karen waved to him from the sidelines. And when it became clear that the driver wasn’t going to stop, Gia rolled off the hood, victoriously brushing off her hands. “Geez, we just wanted to say hi,” she said.

It was the beginning of a week of Bowie madness, with Gia meeting and making a reputation for herself among the older Bowie kids like Marla Fuzz, Fat Pat, Purple and, of course, Joey Bowie. The hardcore fans found out what rooms the Bowie entourage had commandeered in the Bellevue Stratford
Hotel, and they staked out his floor. They called the Bellevue front desk repeatedly trying to get connected to his suite. They set up positions in the hotel’s grand lobby, and chatted up roadies, sound technicians, or anyone who looked vaguely rock ‘n’ roll, in the hopes of being invited up. One group even followed Bowie’s dry cleaning up in the elevator.

Gia was one of the few Bowie kids whose mother sometimes tagged along. She even attended one of the later Tower shows. “I tried to understand why Gia liked Bowie so much,” Kathleen recalled. “So I ended up going to some concerts with her and learned to appreciate Bowie as an artist, a real talent. Gia was tickled to death. I went to the Tower Theater and you could get high just from being in there. I couldn’t
believe
an establishment could have a smell that strong and get away with it. I tried to sit down and talk to some of her Bowie friends, who absolutely drove Henry crazy. I always got along great with her friends. They thought I was really neat because I really tried to understand them.”

“The mother would come to concerts,” recalled Ronnie Johnson. “It was so ridiculous. Gia would be high and the mother would be there thinking she was protecting her daughter.”

“I didn’t find it strange for her mother to do that,” said Karen Karuza. “I had another friend whose mother came to all the concerts. In fact, I remember Gia telling me about one time her mother came back to Bowie’s hotel with her after the concert. She was saying, ‘Here’s my mom with her blond hair and her white Caddie and her big fur coat and she’s talking to Jimmy James, Bowie’s bodyguard.’”

One afternoon, Gia actually managed to wedge herself into Bowie’s elevator before the door closed. Realizing he’d been caught, he leaned against the wood-paneled elevator wall and closed his eyes. Gia just stood there and stared at him, too stunned to act. She finally managed to say hello, introduce herself and even shake his hand before he got off. She was left dumbfounded. A few days later, she wrote about it in a letter to Ellen Moon—who spent summers with her parents in the Poconos.

“Howdy Ellen … I got to shake hands with Bowie Friday night because me and my mummy followed his limo. His arms really feel nice. He’s one nice piece of ass … I’ve done a couple 7-14’s [Quaaludes]. I’ll try to get you two.
They make me too horny and tired. There’s a lot of reds going around here … My mother got her hair cut into a Bowie. Ha! Ha! I think she’s a bit nuts. When you do come back to old Philadelphia if you want to you can take some coke! Take care … see you later alligator … Bowie is the most beautiful person! Don’t cry like me, Love, Gia.”

In the top margin of the letter, Gia explained, “Don’t write me cause I might be living somewhere else.”

But the seminal event in Bowie fandom was still to come, a moment in pop music history that would make Gia and her friends the envy of rock fans the world over. Several weeks after the Tower concerts, in mid-August, Bowie returned to Philadelphia to make a record with hit-making sensations Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, whose Philadelphia International label was suddenly the second coming of Motown. Mixing smooth rhythms and lush orchestrations at the local Sigma Sound Studio, the company had been cranking out hit after hit, each one breaking first on black radio and then crossing over to white audiences. Bowie’s celebrity at this point was still far grander than his album sales: he hoped Gamble and Huff could help him make a record that would appeal to young Americans.

His extended visit made the Bowie kids feel they had been somehow chosen for a divine mission. A core group camped out in front of the studio each evening while Bowie worked through the night, and waited in front of his hotel all day while he slept. During the two weeks Bowie was in town, Gia and the other apostles didn’t even go to the Jersey Shore, where Philadelphians usually migrated each summer. Several of the older fans were fired from their jobs because of the time spent waiting. They grew so chummy with Bowie’s entourage that one night they convinced his limo driver to let them pick David’s hairs off the car’s back seat and empty the cigarette butts from his ashtrays.

Their perseverance did not go unrewarded. As the week wore on, Bowie began stopping to chat with the fans outside the hotel and the studio. “I introduced Gia to David at Sigma,” recalled Toni O’Connor,* who as an eighteen-year-old from Chestnut Hill had only started coming to Bowie concerts the month before, but was making up for lost
groupie time. “I had met him at a big party at his hotel after the show a few weeks before. He fell in love with me instantly.”

Then, at five in the morning after the final session, Bowie took the unprecedented step of inviting the ten fans who remained into the studio. They were played rough mixes of the record, they danced with Bowie and personally offered him their ecstatic comments about
Young Americans.
They even had their exploits detailed in the newspaper. Bowie had made sure that a reporter was in attendance before “spontaneously” inviting the kids in.

The story made the front page of the
Evening Bulletin
, accompanied by a picture of Toni O’Connor that caused her to skyrocket to subcultural fame. Then the writer capitalized on his rock world scoop by selling a version of his story to
Rolling Stone.
Within a few weeks, every rock fan in the English-speaking
world
knew that the sycophancy envelope had been pushed by triumphant Philly fanatics. But, for once, Gia was left to join those noninsiders kicking themselves with jealousy: she had grown impatient during the last hours of the Bowie vigil, and left before the grand finale.

One night during the fall of 1974, Karen Karuza got a phone call at home from Gia. “She was hysterical crying,” Karen recalled. “She didn’t really say much of anything except she was alone and wanted to get out and
‘he’
was bothering her. She wanted my parents to come pick her up. We went and got her, and brought her back to the house. She was so upset—nobody pushed her for any details.

“A while later, her mother showed up at our front door. Her car was double-parked outside our house. My mother went out to talk to her: she told her Gia was very upset and she thought it would be best if she stayed with us for the night.”

The exact details of what happened that night would remain a secret, although its various interpretations would forever color many of the family’s relationships. “Whatever happened between Gia and Henry was forgiven and was settled between the two of them,” Kathleen would say. “She was capable of doing
anything
to get her own way, and she wanted her father and me back together again. I know that
if Henry had not been drinking, that’s one way that it would never have happened. I also know he was so glad that she was being nice to him that it warped him a little bit: she was usually belligerent to him at that time. But I blamed both of them.”

“Gia’s sexuality was the strongest thing in her life,” recalled her aunt, Nancy Adams. “It was the one thing she could control. I think she enticed Henry into coming on to her and knew exactly when to yell ‘uncle.’ He tried to kiss her or something in the kitchen and she really thought that because this happened, her mother would get rid of him. But Kathleen didn’t leave Henry. I don’t know what I would have done in her situation. Whose fault was it? Well, it’s both their faults, but because she’s the child and he’s the adult, he’s responsible.”

Not long after that evening, Henry and Kathleen began coming to counseling with Gia. The sessions were becoming more intense. “The therapist thought he had gotten her to the breaking point and she was gonna spill her guts,” Kathleen recalled, “and she ran out of his office, came home and told me she was moving back in with her father. He told me to let her go because she was suicidal.”

Moving back in with Joe wasn’t quite as simple as it would have been the year before. Joe Carangi had remarried and bought a home in Richboro, a suburban community due north of the Northeast in bucolic Bucks County. Since it was so far from Center City, where he worked, he still kept an apartment over the hoagie shop in town. Moving in with her father meant leaving Lincoln for the more rural Council Rock school system, where someone like Gia was less likely to be considered “unique” than just plain weird. And the new Carangi home was an even less hospitable environment for a young woman than before. The third Mrs. Carangi came into the marriage with four sons of her own. It was going to be six boys and Gia.

“When we lived up in Richboro, the new wife and Gia just couldn’t get along,” recalled her brother Michael. “The move goofed me up because I was used to having the house to myself. I wasn’t sixteen yet, but in the city I didn’t need wheels. Out there, we were really out of town.

“The new wife was a real witch. My father said, ‘Yeah,
each one got worse.’ She gave him hell, maybe a jealousy problem, or maybe she just wanted to be accepted too much. She created total chaos with Gia one night—I just remember she took some clothes Gia had and tore up some stuff. After that, it was never right. Then I remember she got some sort of face-lift, and that was pretty traumatic. And she always had pills … I always knew what stuff they had—my mom, too—because I used to take them from them.”