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A not-so model life

 
Published Sept. 6, 2002|Updated Sept. 3, 2005

Maybe it was the burnished skin, the dark, liquid eyes, the quizzical brows and the black, muscular hair, all of it such a contrast to the apple-pie fetchiness of Cheryl Tiegs, the pow-diggedy, off-kilter pizazz of Lauren Hutton and the rosy blandness of all those Nordic blonds. But what most people remembered was the mouth, that thick, bee-stung mouth, a mouth made for coos, puckers and eff-you cackles, a mouth like a pomegranate, earthy and tart.

"I was the hottest b__ in the world for a minute," the mouth is saying now, the words fading into a soft sigh at the other end of the phone. "I was the bee's knees."

If you happened to be cruising even the most remote fringes of the fashion world in the 1970s and early '80s, even if the closest you ever got to the gilt-chaired salons of Paris and Milan was the magazine rack at Publix, you hardly could have avoided Janice Dickinson. Long before the modeling world would discover Niki Taylor, this sultry, self-styled "Polish mutt" from Hollywood, Fla., had kicked and clawed her way to the top.

"And it was really hard," says Dickinson, who has written No Lifeguard on Duty (ReganBooks, $24.95), a brave, profane memoir of her escape from childhood abuse into the even more risky whirl of bright lights, big cities and spiraling self-destruction. "Getting the door slammed in my face at every appointment: "Sorry. Your face isn't the right shape to sell magazines.' "Sorry. You're way too ethnic.' "Excuse me. You don't serve our purposes.' "You'll never make it in this town. You'll never make it, period.' "

But Dickinson did make it, and there she was, maybe the first of the big fashion divas, magnifique, even delicieuse, skimming the runways of Calvin, Gianni and Valentino; adorning the sleek covers of Cosmo, Bazaar, Elle and Vogue; braced across the crotch of a tree in Africa for Playboy; nude and dripping in a shower shot with four grinning hunks; wrapped in a $28 terry kimono for a catalog layout; splayed across the sides of buses.

Her credits rolling (Revlon, Max Factor, Clairol, Halston, Blass, Perry, Oscar) and her image caught _ seized, really _ by the lenses of Mike Reinhardt, Peter Beard, Avedon, Penn, Bill King, Parkinson, Scavullo, she was hot, hot, hot. Scalding. Haughty. Demanding. And often high, high, high. Doing who-knows-what on that charter flight to Tokyo. Snorting poor, doomed Gia Carangi's heroin at a shoot for the Italian Vogue. So squiffed on champagne she once sailed right off Valentino's runway and into the lap of a flabbergasted Sophia Loren.

Even off-camera, she sizzled, swanning past doormen into Studio 54, palling around with Warhol, Keith Richards and Belushi, attracting A-list lovers as if they were flecks of lint: Jack Nicholson ("You were okay, Jack. Really"); Warren Beatty ("He was great, if you must know"); Mick Jagger ("(I)ndefatigable"); Bruce Willis ("It was nice") and, finally, Stallone ("It didn't last long, but I think I enjoyed it"), with whom she had a famous, tabloid-blared affair that ended when DNA tests proved that Dickinson's daughter, Savvy, now 8, was fathered by another man. You can read about all these guys in the book (see Pages 164, 172, 178, 187, 249), but there were plenty of others, too, and at least one woman. So "they're lucky they made the cut," Dickinson says, laughing. "I need an accounting firm.

"I would walk into a room and things would flat-out change . . . ." In those days beauty worked for me. Beauty opened all the doors; it got me things I didn't even know I wanted, and things I certainly didn't deserve."

And some things, as three failed marriages, two bouts in rehab and flameout after flameout eventually taught her, no one should want, no one deserves.

"I wrote this book as a cautionary tale," Dickinson says, a "tale of incest, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, Studio 54, fashion, fashion, fashion, and . . ." _ odd, endearing hybrid word _ "thrival." And it is, frankly, horrifying, a graphic tell-all that begins with Dickinson's early teenage years as the middle daughter of a chronically abusive father, a spunky kid who managed to resist his incestuous advances but was sometimes beaten and constantly cursed, belittled, threatened and harangued.

Dickinson's book implies that her older sister Alexis, who left home as a teenager, bore the brunt of their father's malicious attention, but all of the household's women suffered, including youngest sister Debbie, who trailed Janice into big-time modeling, and their mother, Jennie, a "good Catholic woman who did everything she was ever asked," Janice says, except calm her husband's angry words and fists.

"Janice never forgave him and therefore never went through the work to get to a point where she could live in peace with herself or with men in general," says Alexis Dickinson Mayer, now a stained-glass artist and real-estate agent in Southampton, N.Y. "I, on the other hand, made peace with him before he died and with myself, and so I have a life that works. It was a very small part of my life and unfortunate, but it was resolved." Mayer says that Debbie, who returned to South Florida to nurse their mother through the last stages of the cancer that killed her in 1995, "has her own ghosts to pursue, but she's not had the hell-life Janice has, it seems. . . . (She) found God, and that's really important in her life now."

Janice, meanwhile, found Judith Regan, the New York publisher famous, and famously envied, for her luck at sniffing out bestsellers, among them Wally Lamb's novel I Know This Much Is True, The Rock's wrestling autobiography and, most recently, Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. Dickinson had begun what would become No Lifeguard on Duty in the 1970s after the late makeup artist Way Bandy suggested she deal with her childhood scars by writing about them. "I picked it up again later as part of the process of a 12-step program," she says. The exercise produced piles of scrawled legal-size pages, "rooms full. I couldn't stop." When she finally phoned Regan, "I just told her from my heart about my life. She said, after about a minute, "I'm in.' I didn't turn in one shred of writing sample. It's kind of a devastating blow to all real writers out there. . . ."

Regan, who "grew up when Janice was big. . . . She was zany," assigned a writer to shape and focus the frazzled manuscript but did not muffle Dickinson's blurting, uncensored voice. "I think her story is a profound example of the horrors of a wounded child," Regan says. "And it also talks about how these early traumas forever haunt us, and how they're very hard to resolve. . . . When women are that beautiful, it's a sort of double-edged sword, because it attracts all kinds of heartache if you're as wounded as she was."

"I wrote this book to urge people not to keep secrets," Dickinson insists. "I still suffer. The memories are still vivid. I made a lot of mistakes. I was shaped by my mistakes. But the past is done. The future's up to me." Now a 47-year-old mother of two (son Nathan, by second husband Simon Fields, is 15), Dickinson is still heart-stoppingly beautiful and says she has been sober for more than two years.

She lives in Bel-Air, Calif., where she is a photographer and pursues a private life syncopated with AA meetings, PTA committees and child advocacy. "I'm tempted," she says of her old addictions, "but I have a sponsor that I check in with daily, and I write in a morning journal and pray. I go to daily meetings, and I am of service. I fill myself up. I give myself 100 percent to my children. The one thing I was meant to be on this earth is their mother. They taught me how to live. I'm keeping my acerbic wit completely fueled. And I have really great friends."

Whether No Lifeguard on Duty will endear Dickinson to readers remains to be seen. Still, "I lived the stuff that Jackie Collins writes about," she says. "I lived it, baby. It's my pathetic life, but I'm proud of it, and I've got so many more stories. I mean, there's only 200-some-odd pages in this book. We're gonna nail it with the next one."

Next one?

"Hell, yes."

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