Close Encounters with Success
Here’s a story that sums up, perfectly, the “Bob Mackie Dilemma.”
Recall the ruckus in 1989 over Cher’s attire in the video for her song “If I Could Turn Back Time?” The one in which she straddled a 16-inch gun on the USS Missouri wearing not much more than a black leather jacket and a fringed body stocking that revealed several large gluteal tattoos, as a couple hundred sailors looked on?
For years, Mackie says, he never acknowledged designing the garment for Cher. And it had nothing to do with criticism that she was disrespectful of the U.S. Navy. “It just looked vulgar.” The only reason he even bothers to bring it up is that someone known for making trashy lingerie recently took credit for the outfit. Damned if Bob Mackie is gonna let that happen, no matter how nasty Cher looked.
A guy wants credit for his work, even if it reinforces an uncomfortable stereotype about his work.
Designing for Cher, arguably his most famous client, has always put Mackie in something of a slightly tawdry box. When you’re known for dressing the Uber tart of American popular culture, getting the ladies who lunch to buy your beautifully tailored daytime clothes is a tough sell. “I know people think all I do is sequins and belly buttons,” he says, sitting in the cluttered Studio City office of his headquarters, Elizabeth Courtney Costumes. “Why kill yourself to do all the daytime clothes and then, basically, they’ll go to someone else for that and come to me for the fancy stuff?” So, despite attempts to broach the daytime divide, Mackie now concentrates on giving them what they want: cocktail glitz, dinner glitz, evening glitz.
As he is the first to admit, Bob Mackie isn’t really a fashion designer. He’s a costume designer. He worked for Jean Louis and Edith Head. He helped dress Judy Garland for her TV show. He was the costume king of the TV special for years. (He continues to be called upon: witness the outrageous, jewel-encrusted “Elizabeth” gown worn by Whoopi Goldberg to open the Academy Awards this year.) Making clothes for real people, he says, “just sort of happened because of all the notoriety I got from this girl.” The girl in question, of course, being Cher, with a body so perfect that sometimes all he had to do was toss a swatch of matte jersey around her lanky frame, stick some fresh orchids in her hair and knock ‘em dead.
Now Mackie is standing in a storage room, an oversized closet with several rolling clothes racks. He is putting together outfits for a retrospective of his work scheduled to open next month at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. The eternally preppy Mackie, 59, and (by his own anguished admission) slightly doughy with 30 extra pounds on his frame, was a top television star-spangler by the age of 24. There will be a lot of ground to cover.
The supply room is a TV time capsule. Suddenly, it is the ‘70s. Irony has not yet put innocence out of business, and millions of people tune in to their weekly TV variety shows to see whom Carol Burnett is spoofing and what Cher is wearing. Mackie did Carol Burnett’s show for 11 years, and costumed the two women simultaneously during an exhausting but creatively fulfilling period of about seven years. On one rack: Cher’s slatternly leopard-print La Verne costume; on another, Burnett’s “Nora” Desmond get-up, with her birdseed-filled saggy breasts still attached, and the flouncy floral print dress worn by Eunice, Burnett’s nod to Tennessee Williams, patched in no less than a dozen places. (“On camera, of course, you’d never see it,” says Mackie, examining all the repairs to the dress Burnett refused to stop wearing no matter how tat-tered it got.) Missing, here at least, is the famous green velvet “curtain rod” dress he made for Burnett, in her Scarlett O’Hara spoof, “Went With the Wind.”
Burnett has often credited Mackie for helping her create her characters, not just dress them. “He designed 50 costumes each week, including wigs and makeup for each character,” writes Burnett in an introduction to Frank DeCaro’s “Unmistakably Mackie,” a book produced for the retrospective. “He saved me and many a comedy sketch by coming up with wonderfully funny ‘character’ outfits that not only enhanced the writing, but many times gave me the clue as to what the character I was playing was all about.”
He’s won Emmys--seven of them--for costuming Diana Ross, Mitzi Gaynor and, mostly, Burnett. And he’s been nominated three times for Oscars. (“Lady Sings the Blues” and “Funny Lady” with his partner, Ray Aghayan; solo for “Pennies From Heaven.”)
In the truest show-biz tradition, his valleys have provided as much pain as the peaks have glory. He and Aghayan opened Bob Mackie Originals in New York in 1982 and soon had licensing deals aplenty: fragrance, furs, knitwear. But by the early ‘90s, due to the recession and questionable management, Mackie’s business life began to come unglued, and his personal life was approaching tragedy. In 1993, it all came apart: his son, Robin, died of AIDS at age 33; he closed down his business in New York; he was unable to keep his longtime quarters on Melrose Avenue; and he lost his Beverly Hills house. A story in Vanity Fair explored his financial connections to a business owned by the Gambino crime family and alleged that, to retire a debt, Mackie clothed a Gambino wedding party.
“It was just a hideous, horrible year,” says Mackie. “You’re going along OK and then, just all of a sudden, it isn’t working.” What rescued him, he says, was work. “I came back to L.A., trying to deal with all this stuff, and they called me up and said, ‘Would you design ‘Gypsy’ [a made-for-TV movie] for Bette Midler?’ and I was like ‘Yeahhhh, I will.’ It was so great because it gave me this thing I had to do every day, and it was a project I loved doing.”
These days, Mackie’s business is scaled down. He has a made-to-order line sold at specialty retailers such as Neiman Marcus (a gorgeously tailored cocktail suit retails for $6,500) and a moderately priced line of cocktail and evening dresses available at Nordstrom and other department stores. He’s just launched a furniture venture with a North Carolina-based company. “Design is design,” he says. “You’re doing embroidery, you’re doing carving, it’s all the same thing.” And there are the $50 silk blouses he sells every six weeks on QVC. He can sell as many as 30,000 in a 24-hour period, he says.
He’s just returned from Las Vegas, where he did the costumes for Cher’s “Believe” tour. It’s not quite as easy to costume her as it used to be, and not just because she’s ballooned from a size 2 to a size 6. (Straight faces, please.) “She had lots of ideas--too many. She wanted to look like some kind of barbaric queen who’s traveled across the country and has everything on her back, and she’s going on and on, and I’m going, ‘Yeah, yeah, OK.’ ”
He produces the sketches. Lots of changes, lots of wigs, lots of glitz. “This one,” he says, “is sort of Celtic-’Braveheart’-Moroccan. She truly looks amazing, but you can’t run out to Neiman’s and buy this.”
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Styled by Michael Eisenhower/Cloutier; hair: Darrell Redleaf-Fielder for Celestine L.A./Cargo; makeup: Antonella Renyer for Cloutier/Valerie Beverly Hills; fashion assistant: Bob Sparkman/Cloutier; dancers: Sybil Azur, Jessica Vallot, Kasumi Takahashi and Jennifer S. Garrett/Kazarian, Spencer & Associates, Studio City, and Kimberly Lyon/Miller Entertainment Group, Los Angeles.
