Bob Mackie Dishes on His New Book, Cher, Edith Head, More – WWD

Although Bob Mackie was already famous for dressing a bevy of stars when he moved to New York to be a fashion designer in 1982, he wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms.

Reviews of his runway shows — one was held at the Shubert Theatre, another inspired by Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, Betty Boop and other famous style icons — were mixed. And he was dismissed by some as “Mr. Hollywood.”

“It’s the oddest thing, they gave me names like ‘Barnum Bob’ because they didn’t know what to do with me.”

Of course, now, all anyone wants to talk about is Hollywood.

Mackie, a costume designer first, was ahead of his time. One only has to look to Gucci’s recent Love Parade on Hollywood Boulevard, inspired in large part by Alessandro Michele’s infatuation with film stars and their costumes, to know that.

Out Nov. 16, a new book titled “The Art of Bob Mackie” (Simon & Schuster) by Frank Vlastnik and Laura Ross, offers fresh insight into his colorful life and talent as an artist. With a foreword by Carol Burnett and an afterword by Cher, it features hundreds of photos and sketches from Mackie’s personal collection.

Fun anecdotes from the designer detail how he helped collaborators get into character, and transformed singers into solo stars (Cher after Sonny, Tina Turner after Ike, Diana Ross after the Supremes, to name a few), all while influencing fashion trends along the way.

During quarantine, Mackie resettled to Palm Springs, Calif. A globetrotter’s dream, every square inch of his new home is covered with fabulous finds. Hand-carved wood banana trees from Bali sit in the living room corner and Indonesian exotic bird ceramics on the kitchen island, while beaded necklaces encircle candles on a credenza. The bathroom walls are papered with photos of the women he’s dressed over the years, from Liza Minnelli to Brooke Shields.

“We figured out recently I’ve been in the union as a costume designer for 60 years — it’s a little terrifying,” said Mackie, 82, whose work is still reverberating in pop culture, whether it’s on the 2021 Tony Awards red carpet, where Bernadette Peters re-wore a starry sequin Mackie dress from 1983 that is pictured in the book, or at Los Angeles’ newly opened Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where his iconic 1986 black beaded midriff-baring gown and feather headpiece for Cher is one of only a handful of Oscar looks on display.

Mackie himself is the subject of a long-awaited film directed by Matthew Miele, due out next year after being delayed because of COVID-19, with commentary from Elton John, Tom Ford, Mel Ottenberg and more.

After racking up nine Emmys, three Oscar nominations and a Geoffrey Beene CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award, Mackie struggles with seeing how his work is used by contemporary designers.

For example, although he helped create John’s image, designing the iconic Donald Duck, Dodgers uniform and Satan costumes, when Julian Day re-created — or at the least reimagined — them for the 2019 biopic “Rocketman,” Mackie’s name was not mentioned.

“I don’t get credit, but I don’t care,” Mackie said. “At 82 years old, you are not trying to make too big an impact.”

And yet, he has.

“When I met Alessandro [Michele] at the Met [Gala] a few years ago, he started crying. [John] Galliano, too. They reacted so strangely about me. I didn’t even think they knew who I was!”

Michele created a collection in 2017 inspired by Mackie’s 1970s costumes for Elton John (and asked Mackie for permission ahead of time).

For the Gucci “Aria” collection in April, he paid tribute to Marilyn Monroe’s Jean Louis-designed, Mackie-sketched “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress from 1962 with a sheer blush lace and feather gown revealing a bra and thong underneath.

“I didn’t design that, but I did the sketch and it was really simple,” said Mackie of one of the most infamous nearly nude celebrity gowns in history, which echoed in Rihanna’s totally nude 2014 Adam Selman gown worn to the CFDA Awards.

At the time he sketched it, Louis was working on “Something’s Got to Give,” the Marilyn Monroe film that never got finished because of her death.

“It’s not that shocking but it’s kind of boring,” Mackie said of all the nudity in fashion now, from the runways to the street.

While Mackie’s work in Hollywood is well-covered in the book, his work on Seventh Avenue is less so.

Even before moving to New York in 1982, he designed a collection of Mod dresses with longtime partner, costume designer Ray Aghayan. They launched it in 1969 at a storefront on Melrose Avenue.

The launch party was attended by a number of luminaries, including Burnett and costume designer Edith Head, who hired Mackie in 1961 to be her sketch artist at Paramount Studios.

“Edith was funny, she didn’t like the fact that I’d been working with her a couple of years, then all of a sudden I got another job as an assistant on ‘The Judy Garland Show,’” Mackie remembered. “She was supposed to do that show.

“She did radio shows, ‘Art Linknletter’s Houseparty,’ she gave out recipes for cookbooks, it was all about keeping Edith’s name out there,” he dished. “But I liked her. She would flirt with the producers like a young girl. And I’m like, OK, if that works! When she went to Paramount, she cheated her way in. She borrowed — or stole — artwork from Chouinard Art Institute, from the attic where they stored old students’ work, and she got the job at Paramount. A guy who was still there when I was there said — and this was in the 1920s — he caught her crying because she couldn’t do the work. She was everyone’s assistant for years, then she kept pushing and pushing and getting her own stars. She’s an interesting character.”

Worthy of her own film, it seems like. A woman working her way up in a costume designers’ world dominated in those days by men, and eventually winning eight Oscars — so there.

While Head may have “stolen” from Chouinard, now called CalArts, while she took evening classes to brush up on her skills, Mackie was one of the school’s most famous drop-outs.

Having won all the costume design prizes already, as he tells it, Mackie was ready to work.

Working alongside Aghayan, an accomplished costume designer in his own right, at “The Judy Garland Show” was a fast introduction to Hollywood. Mackie met rising stars like Minnelli, Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll, and eventually got equal billing with his partner. The two won the first Emmy given by the Academy of Television Arts, for the 1966 color-soaked fantasy “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

Thus began a long career in TV, where Mackie helped bring performers into the swinging 1960s, Mitzi Gaynor and Fred Astaire to name two, and sprinkled his sequin stardust on Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Pink and many more pop stars into the Aughts.

For “The Carol Burnett Show” starting in 1967, he designed 60 to 70 costumes a week for 11 years. “There were times when I didn’t know how I was going to play a character in a certain sketch until I could see how I was going to look and what I was going to wear,” Burnett writes in the book’s foreword.

For the 1968 “The Fred Astaire Show,” a song-and-dance special, he decked out the 68-year-old in turtlenecks, Nehru jackets and groovy trousers.

He first met Cher when she was a guest on Burnett’s show when, as the story goes, she was coveting one of his beaded gowns on the rack. She told Mackie, “Gee, I hope someday I can ask you to make something like this for me.”

By 1971, he was also designing costumes for “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” down the hall at CBS. It was the golden age of variety shows, and each week was a costume spectacular.

“You couldn’t give away a halter dress until I started putting it on Cher. Then, that’s all department stores wanted,” he said. (The star was also the original standard bearer of midriff fashion, now everywhere, including on Zendaya at the CFDA Awards.)

But Mackie also dressed Cher in a lot of stereotypes, he conceded, “Things you cannot do now,” he said, commenting on the Native American head dresses she wore for the album “Half Breed,” in particular, as being insensitive.

Mackie also designed several movies, from Diana Ross’ sublime 1972 Billy Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues,” to John Travolta’s ill-advised 1983 “Staying Alive,” to the infamous 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special,” of which, legend has it, George Lucas has bought up every last copy.

“It’s one of the worst shows ever, but ‘Star Wars’ fans want anything to do with. They came calling and asked if I had sketches — the show had Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, Art Carney, it had some good people. I sold them at auction, whatever sketches were left. I got some good money.…You do what you have to at the time,” he said.

In 1980s New York, Mackie’s bedazzled eveningwear was his most successful category, and he spun off licenses for everything from furs to fragrance. He’s been designing a collection for QVC since 1992, and also sells sketches and limited-edition Barbie dolls on his website.

But he never reached the rarified realm of Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta or Carolina Herrera.

“Fashion was odd then, it was really for that middle-aged woman who had money; that’s who they did the clothes for,” he said of how his glitzy style was interpreted.

The book highlights Elizabeth Courtney, an unsung hero, whose workroom was where Hollywood’s biggest costume designers did their fittings on Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Monroe, Cher, Peters and more.

Mackie’s costumes for “The Judy Garland Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Sonny & Cher Show” were all executed in her studio. “She had lots of bedside manner and these ladies adored her and trusted her,” Mackie said. “She started in the early 1930s. Her husband was a barber, her son became a stunt man in the movies. We learned a lot about fitting from her.”

If his relationships with his stars sound a bit like the celebrity-stylist relationships of today, think again. “Some of them are brilliant, and know just what to put on the person, and some of them just bring in a lot of stuff. For me, a star needs to look like the audience wants them to look, but a bit better than usual.

“Used to be, if you were a costume designer working with an actress on a project, you’d end up doing an outfit for them to wear to the Oscars, because you’d be seeing them everyday. And also, they had to pay for their dresses or the studios did. Very often, the studios did if they were publicizing a film or under contract.”

Now, actresses are under contract with luxury brands, not studios.

“Once Armani started giving them free clothes, I said well that’s that. I thought it was so funny these women who got millions of dollars for being in a movie got so excited about a free dress,” he said.

Mackie, it turns out, was often the voice of reason when it came to Cher’s outlandish red carpet looks. “I’d try to discourage her, and say ‘Are you sure you want to wear that? You’ll be pulling focus from whoever you give an award. But the next morning her picture would be everywhere and then for the next 30 years, too. She knew and she loves to dress up, too.”

Looking back now on his 60-year career, Mackie does have a few regrets. “We were offered ‘The Great Gatsby’ film and didn’t take it. That was a hard one. But my best friends were Cher and Carol Burnett and they were in the same studio, right next to each other. I wasn’t just going to quit,” he said of his decision about the 1974 film. “Theoni Aldredge got an Oscar but the film wasn’t exactly a hit.”

Still, his entire career, the Oscar has eluded him. “I had three nominations, but it would be fun to have an Oscar. For show business, I probably shouldn’t have gone to New York to do fashion. But everyone thought of me as doing Cher and there was so much exposure of me at the time…”

His last project was “The Cher Show” on Broadway, which opened in 2018. He designed 600 costumes, including for Michael Berresse, the actor who played a more flamboyant version of Mackie’s real-life L.L. Bean persona. The designer took home his first Tony Award for the production.

“I would love to do another show, but it’s my own fault. I love it here, but it’s not good for work. It’s just not,” he said, looking out over his pool to the mountains. “I worked so many years, but I don’t want to give it up either, I want it all.”