That’s super young.
SL: Yeah, well there were five makeup artists in New York City at the time who were doing editorial. There was Joey Mills, Way Bandy, Gloria Natale… There is someone I am leaving out, but you can say Ariella, too. She was a friend of mine. I brought her along a little bit later on. Oh, and Pablo Manzoni. Now there are five million! Before, there were five. Can you imagine?
I know you must hear this question a lot but—
SL: About Gia. Go ahead.
Can you talk about that infamous 1978 shoot with the fence, by Chris von Wangenheim?
SL: Well, I was booked to do a shoot with Gia and another model named Lisa Vale during the day with Chris von Wangenheim. And I had worked with Gia before. I had no idea that she was gay. It never clicked with me that she was. I just never thought about it. At the end of the day, I was packing up my make-up. I had also, just to set this up, done shoots with Chris on Fire Island. One weekend he invited himself—I didn’t invite him, he was a big, big photographer, and I was kind of in awe of him. I was not his buddy at that time. I would never say, Chris, why don’t you come out to my Fire Island house that I’m sharing with five other hairdressers? But he decided to come out, and to photograph.
And Gia was there, too?
SL: I think Gia was on the island, but she was staying someplace else. Chris took some pictures of me. All very arty, if you get the meaning of art pictures… Now, having said that, I have to go into how I understand why girls don’t do art pictures anymore: There are blogs. You know, I see my picture on the fence with Gia on Facebook, and I’m like, It doesn’t belong there. It was never Chris’s intention to put this there. So I understand why Kate Upton and all these gorgeous women won’t do nude. I get it. And they shouldn’t, if that’s what’s going to happen to the work.
But back then...
SL: So, I had already worked with Chris, and when he said to me, Will you do some personal pictures for me? I said, Okay. Simple as that. Then, he put his head back into the room and said, Nude. I said, Hm, okay. Then, he put his head back in the room again and said, With Gia. I said, Okay. He made women feel more beautiful than anybody else. Patti Hansen will tell you, we’ve discussed it already—he was the guy that made you feel the most beautiful. So, I do this shoot with Gia, the music is playing, the photography is hot, he’s the greatest photographer of the moment, and I packed up and went home. But during the shoot, she decided that she was in love with me. It was a little bit of manipulation. Chris knew he was gonna get a good shot from Gia. I was totally unaware of what he knew, you see.
So, this shoot was what prompted her long love for you?
SL: Oh yeah. I had worked with Gia before. I’d worked with her plenty of times. There was never ever a moment before that it felt anything other than makeup artist and model. Never ever.
Was she aware of her sexual orientation?
SL: She had to be. I mean, yeah. She was 19 years old. I had never met a lesbian before that.
What do you think it is about her that has continued to fascinate?
SL: She is as beautiful as the actress who portrayed her! And that was a very unlikely thing to happen because when I was interviewed for the HBO movie, I had never heard of Angelina Jolie. That was their stroke of genius. So, if you watch the movie and you are captivated by Angelina Jolie and then you start to look at Gia’s pictures, you see that they’re neck and neck.