2002 Interview

Wild thing: supermodel Janice Dickinson bares it all. (Buzz).(Interview)
Los Angeles Magazine, Sept, 2002, by Amy Wallace

"LA JANICE" LIES ATOP A TABLE IN A sweltering photo studio. She is on her back. She wears no shirt. Her silicone-enhanced breasts--"my 36C rad puppies"--jut out beneath her black satin brassiere. Her tummy is flat and caramel colored. There are silver rivets running up the seams of her size 6 blue jeans. Her feet are bare, and the way she rests them on the wall above makes her glitter toenail polish catch the light. She is a model. She is 47 years old. She is, she admits, a head case.

Janice Dickinson is getting ready to do the thing that, back in the late '70s and the '80s (what she calls "the Jurassic era of modeling"), put her on the cover of every major fashion magazine in the world: pose. Her makeup man, Kevin, is stenciling on her eyebrows and fixing her face; her hair man, Chad, is blowing out her red-brown mane. It will take hours to become perfect, but that's all right. Dickinson--muse of Versace, lover of Jagger (and Beatty, and Nicholson, and Stallone ...), and mother of two--has much to say to pass the time.

"If you think I'm over-the-top," she says, "I am."

Leaning her head back, she sends her hair cascading over the table's edge, and the words come spilling out of her--just like they did when she sat down to write her new autobiography, No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (Regan Books). She talks fast, sometimes borrowing phrases from people she's met ("Dahlink!" Dickinson says, adding helpfully, "I'm doing Ivana Trump") or from cultural icons ("Willll-bur!" she whinnies, channeling Mr. Ed). In her head, Ivana and the horse complete each other's sentences. Is she wack for wack's sake? It's hard to tell. Especially when she keeps interrupting herself, reciting fragments of disco lyrics ("Don't stop 'til you get enough!") and the phone number of her plastic surgeon ("Call him for comment. Seriously. He's a master. That's why I would let only him touch my face. And my chest. And my ass").

"I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample," she says, remembering the day she called the celebrity book editor Judith Regan to pitch her story. "I was having an invincible moment. I told her how difficult it was for me growing up with an abusive father, how when I went to New York to become a model I was rejected for a year for being `too ethnic.' Judith said, `Okay, I'm in.' And I hadn't even gotten to the A-list actors yet. Because it's not about the men that I dated. It's not about sleeping with Jack Nicholson."

Well, okay, maybe part of it is. In the memoir Dickinson lists a cavalcade of famous suitors. She says Liam Neeson is endowed like a barnyard animal and that Bruce Willis, prestardom, was the kind of sweetheart who bounds out of bed in the morning to go buy you breakfast. Beatty "knew where everything was and what to do with it" (though she reports that as much as he liked sex, he loved staring at himself in the mirror more) Jagger was "indefatigable." Stallone is said to have uttered the phrase "Bam ham slam" after their lovemaking. And Nicholson? The graphic, arrogant thing he supposedly told Dickinson after a night of passion cannot be reprinted here. But it's in the book, she says, because nobody tells Dickinson what to do.

"The reason that line made the book is because he told me not to say anything. And I will never, ever respond to anybody--man, woman, vegetable, or mineral--who tells me to keep my mouth shut. Alter what I've been through, I don't think so, pal," she says, arching a hennaed brow. "Wait until you read book two. I'll really throw in the guys. I didn't even begin to broach the subject."

A regular at Studio 54, Dickinson hung out with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and John Belushi. Her book is rife with recognizable names from the worlds of modeling, photography, fashion, and Hollywood, and its plotline is something you've read many times before: An ugly duckling's hidden shame makes her fight all the harder to become a swan. Dickinson's "Polish mutt" look--full, "waterbed landing pad" lips, dark tresses--was the opposite of the fair-haired, thin-lipped all-American ideal (think Cheryl Tiegs) of the late 1970s. But Dickinson helped prove that exotic, too, could sell.

Dickinson claims she "kicked the damn door in," making it easier for nonblonds like Gia Carangi, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington to make it. That's not all she takes credit for. She says she coined the term "supermodel," for example, and that she's the one who gave Calvin Klein the idea to market underwear. Even at the height of her modeling career, however, when she was commanding top dollar and being photographed by the likes of Richard Avedon and Horst P. Horst, she says the memory of her father's brutality pushed her to abuse alcohol and drugs. Eventually she hit bottom.

"You can leave out my chronological age, dear. Or leave it in. I don't give a rat's ass. When I hit 45--ba da boom!--I couldn't stop crying," she says, in an imperious Norma Desmond drawl. If not for Tony Peck, Gregory's son, who helped her find a 12-step program near her Bel-Air home, Dickinson says she might not be here today, having Evian sprayed on her cheeks.

"Because of my father, I developed a crass, acerbic-witted, in-your-face attitude of defiance at an early age," she says, shutting her eyes as Kevin, the makeup man, applies a fine mist. "I couldn't focus in school. They thought it was ADD."

"It wasn't ADD," says Kevin. "It was DAD."

Dickinson laughs--a throaty crackling sound. "Write that!" she orders. "That's great. Without gay men, I am nothing." She can be a mensch. Dickinson looks fondly at Kevin. "He's taking my face from the unhealthy straggling insect chick to, like, a total diva."

"Do you know what I say when I go to Starbucks, just to give myself a little ego pump?" she says. "When they ask for name, I tell them, and they write it on the cup, and when my coffee's ready, they yell, out, `Diva Goddess!' and I say YES!'"