If, at 48, Durante sounds a little been-there-done-that, it's because she probably has. As a polka-dot-bikini-clad Kodak girl in the 1960s, the Rochester, N.Y.-born beauty was the model for 80,000 life-size cardboard cutouts in drugstores nationwide. At 16 she fell in with some seemingly nice guys from the neighborhood who, it turned out, were members of the Mob. While keeping up a modeling career she became their sometime chauffeur, driving what turned out be getaway cars after shakedowns, robberies and at least one shooting. In the past 10 years she used those tricks of the trade to speed her way into the top echelon of stunt drivers. And last year she began dating a lawyer who just happens to be a former chief of the Justice Department's strike force on organized crime.
If her tale sounds like something from a book, it is. In October, Durante's 456-page memoir The Company She Keeps hit bookstores and is now the subject of a possible mini-series. Fine, says Durante, but bear in mind that this is no Scorsese script. "It's all true," says the author, sitting in the living room of her Los Angeles cottage amid photos of her with a slew of celebs—from Farrah to Tony Bennett—whom she met while modeling or making movies. "I never really gave much thought to it until people read it and were so blown away. That's when I realized, 'Gee, my life was kind of bizarre.' "
From the start it was clear that Durante's life would rise above the mundane. Born in 1950 to a mother who scandalized her Rochester neighbors by falling in love with a stranger who promptly skipped town after she became pregnant, Durante showed her rebellious streak early. At 12 she totaled several golf carts at the local country club and, after hopping a freight train, was carted home by police. "I was the one who stayed home and cleaned for my mother, but she was wild," says Sharon Brockler, 51, Durante's only sibling. "We laughed a lot. We used to fight a lot. We were a very cool family, basically."
It was also when she was 12 that Durante had her first experience in front of a camera. Posing for a Kodak audition at the company's studio, she was told that she would never make it as a model because she wasn't polished enough. But by 1962, after practicing the poses she saw in teen mags, she began getting work as an $80-a-day model in print ads for businesses such as Kodak, Xerox and French's Mustard. By 15 she was pulling in $250 to $300 for a day's modeling.
Not long after she began her modeling career, she met trouble at a local soda shop in the form of Sammy Gingello, aka Sammy G, then a 23-year-old hoodlum. "I was 13 when he took me under his wing," she says. "Two guys started hitting on me, and Sammy beat the hell out of them. I thought, 'Wow, somebody's doing this for my honor.' I was very impressed." Though never her lover, Sammy, who eventually became capo of the Rochester Mob, did serve as Durante's entrée into the underworld, taking her on trips to the Bahamas and Las Vegas. "Being in his company was very exciting," she recalls. "You felt the power."
At 16 she became a neighborhood pariah after a brutal rape by her sister's husband. "Everyone saw him as the victim, but Sammy G wanted him killed," she says. "So at 17 I held a man's life on the tip of my tongue. All I had to do was say, 'Yeah, do it.' But I couldn't do that to any human being."
Still, she appreciated Sammy G's support. "The rape stripped me of self-esteem," she says. "[The mobsters] treated me with respect and trusted me with information. And did I feel safe? Absolutely." After graduating from high school in '68 she moved to New York City to model and began tending bar at a club owned by one Frankie Conti, alias Frankie C. One night, when a man at the bar pulled a gun on another customer, she witnessed her first shooting—and found a new career. "Frankie says, 'Get the car. Pull it up front.' So I did," she recalls. "They got him in the back, and I drove like hell to the hospital." The victim survived, but "all anyone talked about that night was how I drove," says Durante. As Frankie C, now a security consultant living in Manhattan, remembers it, "It showed what Georgie was made of, because I was shaking like a leaf."
Seeking a bit of calm in 1968, Durante returned to Rochester to marry her high school sweetheart. "Even then I knew it was a mistake. He was normal. Maybe too normal," she says. "But I did it because I didn't think anybody else would want me." The couple's daughter Toni was born in 1969. That year, Durante did Sammy a favor while on a modeling gig in New York City by dropping off an envelope with a "gray-haired man with cold, beady eyes." Later, Sammy's assistant mentioned that the old man had liked her. "Which old man?" Durante asked. "Carlo Gambino," he replied, referring to the head of the famous Mafia clan.
Over time, Durante kept up her Mob ties, serving as errand girl, driver and occasional courier. "I dropped off and picked up money from cargo planes at JFK airport," she says. "Millions of dollars, I was later told." At 19, after her brief marriage ended, she met Joe Lamendola, a small-time hood, at his Rochester nightclub. "I could feel his eyes on me. I turned around, looked at him, and he said, 'I'm going to marry you.' " He did, but the honeymoon didn't last. "We had a lot of fun at first," says Durante. "Then I became his possession."
As Durante suffered ever escalating physical abuse, she tried to stay focused by modeling. "One session she came in with a dark spot under her eye," says Neil Montanus, 70, who photographed her initial Kodak ads. "She said, 'Oh, I'm sorry. I bumped into the door.' I said, 'Georgie, we can't use you this way. Makeup won't cover it.' "
One day in 1977, seeing Toni's sadness as she sat alone at a swimming pool, Durante made her decision to flee the marriage. "I had been so consumed by my own pain," she says, "that not until that moment did I realize how deep her pain was." But Durante's luck was no better with husband No. 3, Richard Adray, the millionaire owner of an appliance-store chain. In 1988, five years after the marriage ended, Durante lost custody of the couple's son Dustin, now 18 and a student at Santa Monica College.
Finally, at 33, divorced for a third time, Durante realized that her modeling days were nearing an end. Posing for a Toyota commercial, she began to think that, given her experience behind the wheel, she might make a good stunt driver. She enrolled in a stunt-driving school and looked for work, but at first the jobs were slow in coming. "I couldn't just tell them what my resumé was," she says. " 'Driver for the Mob' doesn't cut it." Eventually word of her expertise began to spread. Commercial director John Stevens first hired her in 1978 on an employee's advice. "I'd never used a woman before, but he told me, 'Georgie drives like a guy, only better,' " says Stevens, "so I gave her a shot. This woman didn't just drive. She added an extra dimension."
Durante landed her first movie job in 1984's Beverly Hills Cop. "It wasn't a stunt, but what we call precision driving," she says. "I drove a Clenet roadster down Beverly Boulevard. There are only 250 of those cars in the U.S." Two years later she was in such demand that she was turning down work, and she and Toni, now 28, founded Performance Two, a company that employs 14 drivers for just about any sort of film or TV work.
Today, as the veteran of 20 feature films and more than 300 commercials, Durante has a scrapbook filled with photos of her posing with the likes of Quincy Jones, Hugh O'Brian and Kato Kaelin. She has doubled for, among others, Linda Evans, Piper Laurie, Josie Bissett and, for a 1990 Oldsmobile commercial, Priscilla Presley, whose daughter Lisa Marie also appeared. "Lisa was scared to death to say two words because we were working with a helicopter two inches off the bumper," says Durante. "She was terrified."
Last year, Durante's life took yet another turn for the better when, at a dinner, she met criminal defense attorney Jim Henderson, 52, who as a former prosecutor has 100 organized-crime cases to his credit. On their first date the couple saw the hit gangster film Donnie Brasco. "Jim's watching it from his perspective, and I'm watching it from mine," says Durante. "When it was over, we looked at each other and said, 'Gee, I don't know if this is going to work.' " So far, says Henderson, it has: "Georgia's obviously turned her life around. She's come a long way."
Durante sometimes ruminates about how she managed to survive the life she once led. "I want to go back to college to understand what happened," she says. "I really want to know the psychology behind it all." The answer may be complex. Or, as her friend Frankie C believes, it may be something more simple. "Georgie," he says, "was always a slice above the rest."
Susan Schindehette
John Hannah in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- John Hannah.
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