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it again and see Marisa Berenson in a billowy Bill Blass gown. I can do that, too, I told myself.
    I’d look good in a tweed suit by Coco Chanel. Or anything by Halston: I loved the way Halston layered fabrics; he could layer me anytime at all.

    32 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N
    The thing is, I had to believe. I had nothing else. Modeling was going to be the way out for me. Without my crazy fantasy life, I was lost.
    “The new Vogue ’s in, Janice!” It was Doris, with her raspy voice. She was in her late fifties and had leathery skin and platinum, bubble-teased hair. She put in forty hours a week as a checker, and Friday nights she went off to play bingo with her friends. This was her life. “What is it with you and these magazines?” she asked. “You’re like a drug addict.” And I thought, Doris, you don’t know how right you are.
    The week after my mother told me I was beautiful, she took a morning off from work and said she had a surprise for me.
    “What’s the surprise?” I asked.
    “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, now, would it?”
    She told me to dress nice and helped me with my
    makeup, but she refused to tell me where we were going.
    I put on a form-fitting silk shirt with high-waisted bolero pants and platform shoes; always the platform shoes.
    We got in the car, and I kept pestering her, and she’d just laugh and smile and say, “You’ll see!” For a moment there I thought, She’s almost like a normal mother.
    And then we pulled off the freeway and she parked in front of a squat little building with a small sign out front that read, John Robert Powers/School of Modeling. I couldn’t believe it. She really did think I was beautiful.
    And we went inside and met the woman who ran the
    place, Dawn Doyle, a perfect little specimen, all poise and polish. She looked me up and down with obvious displeasure, like this was some kind of joke or something. But then suddenly— ka-ching! —“We have another paying client, people!” So she changed her tune. Smiled. Became pleas

    N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 33
    ant and wonderful. Circled me two or three times. “Yes.
    Hmmm. I think we can work with Janet.”
    “Janice,” I said.
    She smiled at me, a tight and venomous smile. She
    turned me around and indicated my reflection in the mirror.
    She tried hard to look pensive, to convey that she was thinking about how she was going to transform me. And I looked at my reflection, too. My hard little body. Bone thin. Visibly undernourished. Those raisin breasts. My huge lips. It was obvious she thought I didn’t have it. And I hated her for it.
    “Well, we have our work cut out for us, but I see a lot of potential here,” she said brightly.
    You don’t know how right you are, bitch.
    So, yes, I pursued the dream—as they say. Really threw myself into it. This is how you walk the John Powers Walk.
    This is how you apply makeup the John Powers Way. This is how you smile—from the inside, deep inside, even if you have to fake it.
    The other girls in my class were about the biggest
    dullards I’d ever met in my life, but we all shared the same, immediate goal: to make it to the annual National John Robert Powers Modeling Contest, to be held later that year in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
    “You’re going to win,” Pam Adams told me. She wasn’t at all interested in modeling—she wanted to be a writer—
    but she thought I was beautiful, and she knew I saw the fashion business as my way out. “You’re perfect,” she said.
    “Look at you. You’ve got long thin legs and beautiful stick-thin arms—you look like a plate of spaghetti. Plus you’ve got no tits. None of these girls have tits.” It was true. Haute couture was made for girls who looked like young boys.
    “And you know what the best part is?” Pam added. “Once

    ªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªªª
    POSING AT THE JOHN ROBERT
    POWERS SCHOOL OF
    MODELING.
    you make it, you can have
    any man you want.” She
    was