Paris: The Memoir(61)
Modeling and acting, you have to be cool with being looked at—objectified, even—but you have to own it. You’re not there as a prop for someone else’s art; you’re there as a collaborator, breathing life into a shared vision, taking that idea to a whole different place because of your own creative input. No one has the right to take it anywhere you don’t want to go. The greatest photographers are the ones who understand that. They get you to go above and beyond by bringing you into the vision.
This was pre-iPhone, but I kept my old-school beeper with me at all times so I could take advantage of any opportunities that came up. One day I got a call to fill in on an ad campaign for Iceberg jeans. It was great money, and more important, the photographer was David LaChapelle. This was huge.
As a teenager, David was a protégé of Andy Warhol, so my mom and dad knew him from back in the day. When his first book, LaChapelle Land was published in 1996, New York magazine called him “the Fellini of photography” because he created huge controversy with images that basically microwave everything you ever thought about constructs like pretty and art and weirdness. Naked people piled up in a Plexiglas box. Children destroying a fancy dinner party. The environments are colorful and iconic.
Like Herb Ritts or Annie Leibovitz or Richard Avedon, David has an unmistakable style. You recognize his work the second you see it. I’d never seen anything like the pictures LaChapelle was doing back then. The faces are breathtaking. No fear, no hesitation, no inhibition. I wanted to feel what those people were feeling. I wanted to be a work of art like that.
David just wanted someone who was available. That morning, they had set up the Iceberg shoot and discovered that the model he’d chosen didn’t fit the designer’s sample size. So he beeped me. It was crazy for a minute because I’d been out partying every night that week—dancing my ass off at a series of parties and raves, living on catnaps and French fries—but I was not about to miss this opportunity. I zipped over from my house in LA, careful to avoid my mom, showered, changed, and threw myself together in record time. I was at that shoot literally forty-five minutes after he beeped me. I was dying of excitement.
It went fine. Nothing extreme. He did a lot of standard commercial campaigns back then, and this was one of them. Cool, but appropriate for a mass audience in print.
I wanted to be in one of those iconic David LaChapelle shoots with the bizarre setups where it feels like a still from some NC-17 art-house movie that exists only in his mind. Participating in those photos was more than modeling; it was performance art. I was glad for a chance to show him how hard I was willing to work, and I hoped it would go somewhere.
His second book, Hotel LaChapelle (Bulfinch, 1999), reimagined Madonna as Krishna, Leonardo DiCaprio as Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Manson as a school safety officer. He posed Barbie with a little gun shooting Ewan McGregor in the face as he breaks into her Dream House.
That book came out right after I left Provo. As I relearned New York, I saw it in every bookstore window, and I tried not to get stuck on the idea that I might have been in it if I hadn’t disappeared. I wondered if he’d heard the London boarding school story or if he even noticed I was gone.
I try not to think about how easily I slipped through a crack in the floor. It’s like, if you were walking down the street with your friends, and suddenly one of them slipped down an open manhole, you’d notice, wouldn’t you? I certainly would! I mean . . . I think I would. I hope I would. Or maybe we’re all so focused straight ahead, people slip away when we’re not looking.
Shit. Let’s all take a sec and check our people. Make sure no one has slipped down a manhole.
If I didn’t notice you slip down a manhole, I’m sorry. And if you didn’t notice when I slipped down the manhole, please, know that I’m not mad about it.
Anyway, I reconnected with David at a party and told him I’d love to work with him again. (Networking, always networking.) I didn’t tell him about everything that had happened to me during my lost years, but he could tell it was a lot. I think this is an important aspect of his genius. He sees. I wonder if maybe he recognized we had something in common; we’d both sustained some damage during our teens.
We talked about Andy Warhol’s muse, Edie Sedgwick, the intriguing idea of the “It Girl,” and how celebrity worship mimics religious ecstasy.
“Throughout history,” David said, “you always see the celebrated ones—queens and kings, aristocracy, entertainers—seemingly above all others, God-like to the people who celebrate them. People cried at a Beatles concert the same way they cried over a vision of Mary. It’s the same well of tears.”
Like me, David was raised Catholic, and he was very into it. His work is soaked in spiritual influence—transcendence, forgiveness, enlightenment—and full of religious iconography. In the late 1970s, he dropped out of school after ninth grade, ran away from home, and worked as a busboy at Studio 54, surrounded by innovators like Grace Jones, Freddie Mercury, and David Bowie and legends like Andy Warhol, Diane von Furstenberg, and Salvador Dalí. I totally get how a kid would come from that experience with a different vision of the world. My own worldview was influenced by the music and intensity of club life, and I’d grown up surrounded by my mom’s circle of fabulous friends, including legends like Paula Abdul, Michael Jackson, and Wolfgang Puck.
David was just seventeen when he started working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine in 1980, and he worked on every issue until Warhol died, in 1987. Warhol was like, “Do whatever you want. Just make everyone look good.” David LaChapelle is what happens when someone is wise enough to give a creative kid a broad directive and then trust the result.