Bob Mackie Looks Back on a Lifetime of Dressing Divas

 

Bob Mackie has lived a life most people couldn’t even dream of. From a childhood obsession with the silver screen to an epic career costuming some of the greatest performers of the past six decades, the designer has done it all. And with with a newly released documentary, Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, under his belt, the 84-year-old is ready to look back on a lifetime of dressing divas in bedazzled, barely-there looks: from Judy Garland to Cher to Tina Turner, Liza Minelli, and even today’s powerhouse celebs including Miley Cyrus and Zendaya. But how did he keep his creativity flowing while handling such larger-than-life personas? As Mackie tells our senior editor Taylore Scarabelli, “It was like show business heaven, and that’s what I loved more than anything.”

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TAYLORE SCARABELLI: Hi Bob, nice to meet you. I’m Taylore.

BOB MACKIE: Nice to meet you Taylore. You’re camera friendly. You look good.

SCARABELLI: Thank you. You look great yourself. I’m so impressed by your vigor. It was really great to see the documentary last night and hear you speak afterwards.

MACKIE: It kills you because some of those pictures were taken over 10 years ago. There’s different things from different periods, and I looked a little chubby at times, or I needed a haircut, but what are you going to do? You just put yourself in there and let go.

SCARABELLI: How does it feel looking back on your career? Because it’s been an incredible ride, you’ve been doing this for over 50 years.

MACKIE: It’s like anything you do when you’re in that business, I’ve always worked, I basically never had a lot of time off. But it’s fabulous, because you’re so happy you’re doing it. I was delighted that I got some really perfect jobs early on in my career, and that it helped get other jobs.

SCARABELLI: Well, that’s my first question. What was your first pinch me moment, the moment when you landed a gig and you were like, “I can’t believe I’m here doing this?”

MACKIE: Well, I was in school and I quit to go get a job because I’d been there long enough and I had won little awards at the art school and whatever. I was 21 or 22. I went to Hollywood and I hit a couple of the studios with my portfolio, and that very day I got my first call to go draw sketches for a designer that was doing a film with Marilyn Monroe. And I thought, how does this happen on your first time you go out? You’re drawing pictures of Marilyn Monroe every day. I mean, it was too crazy. And of course she didn’t finish the film, it was one of those where she wasn’t coming some days and she was a little foggy at times, but she was fabulous to look at.

SCARABELLI: And that was your introduction into a long career of working with divas, some of the most fabulous performers ever.

MACKIE: Some divas are fabulous to work with and are so professional, but Marilyn had her problems. Later I worked with Judy Garland, who was brilliant, but there were days when she didn’t show up. And yet if somebody great was on the show with her, it was magic. If Barbra Streisand showed up to do a bit, and then they got Ethel Merman out of the audience, it was like show business heaven, and that’s what I loved more than anything.

SCARABELLI: What do you think it is about you, and your personality, that made you the right match for these larger-than-life women? There’s got to be a reason why all these people trusted you and felt comfortable with you, other than your obvious talent for creating beautiful clothes.

MACKIE: Well, when you’re dressing people that are already famous and are known for the way they look, the way they walk, the way they talk, how well they do a joke, you have to really study them and know them. And there were people that I knew from just going to the movies as a kid, so when they would be guest stars on the show, I’d go, “Oh, I can’t wait to get my hands on her.” 

SCARABELLI: So you think you being a fan, or just approaching them from a place of love, helped?

MACKIE: You can’t be the fan, but you have to be knowledgeable. Like, “Oh, your legs look great in those shoes.” You try very hard to protect them, and at the same time, show off their best qualities. And very often, it’s how they talk, how they’ll turn and look at somebody, that makes magic on screen. Working with Carol Burnett was just amazing, I loved doing comedy. And she was a big movie fan, so when we would do spoofs on movies, she understood exactly where I was going with it and I understood what she was thinking. We would work together. 

SCARABELLI: Speaking of The Carol Burnett Show, I’ve noticed that there’s a certain levity within all of your work, regardless of whether you’re doing comedy. 

MACKIE: Thank you, I try. But you can go too far. There are some designers that they’re so intent on being funny that it’s goofy, it’s like seeing a clown at a parade. You want it to be more clever than that. That’s why the famous curtain rod dress [on The Carol Burnett Show] finally happened, because we’d seen that joke in Gone with the Wind a million times, and that wasn’t funny anymore. We had to try something different. 

SCARABELLI: I think it’s interesting what you say about not going too far, because in the era of social media, people always want a gag, they want to do something that really pops, but it’s often at the expense of looking good. 

MACKIE: Oh, it’s a gag like that [mimicks putting a finger down his throat]. Sometimes they wear things and you say, “What does she have that on for? Did anyone look in the mirror?”

SCARABELLI: It’s often at the expense of actually paying attention to how something looks on someone’s body, whether or not something is truly flattering versus attention grabbing. Not a lot of people can do both.

MACKIE: Hello, you are right on track. Some people need a little touch of comedy in their performance because that’s just how they work, and then other people have no sense of humor about it and they just want to look gorgeous. It’s a little problematic when the material doesn’t really feed that properly.

SCARABELLI: You want to hit that sweet spot, which brings me to my next question. Do you consider yourself a provocateur?

MACKIE: I do and I don’t. I think I’m more clever about things sometimes than other people are, especially designers that do theatrical things. 

SCARABELLI: The reason I ask is because in the documentary, we go back to the time of the first naked illusion dresses, seeing Mitzi doing her dance with all those men in tuxedos, I can imagine how groundbreaking that was.

MACKIE: Did you like Mitzi Gaynor in her fringe dress? 

SCARABELLI: I never knew about Mitzi until I watched the documentary, and now I’m obsessed with her.

MACKIE: She was my first star client. This fellow that I worked with, she wanted him to do the show she was on, and he says, “No, I have to go to London. I’m up to my ass in Judy Garland.” And of course that made her laugh. And then he recommended me because I’d been working with him. The next day she hired me. It was crazy. You don’t get hired the next day unless you do something phenomenal. And I didn’t do anything except just be young and look cute. You can only get by with that for so long.

SCARABELLI: It does help.

MACKIE: Well, sometimes it doesn’t help at all. It’s funny, every now and then, a young client would come in and all of a sudden they had a crush on me and I’d go, “Oh dear, this is dangerous.” It happened with Cher, it happened with Liza, they just liked me because I was young. Cher said, “Oh, when I go to these fittings, everybody’s really old and I’m not sure they’re doing the best for me.” She was only 19 when I met her. Liza was like 16 or 17. Then after a while I was just as old as everybody else. Now I’m the oldest.

SCARABELLI: You had a fresh perspective. Back to the naked illusion dress, was that a big deal when that went on TV? Were people like, “Wow, this is kind of crazy?”

MACKIE: Well, by the time she got on TV with it, Cher had worn it to the Met Ball, the first one they ever did. And the place went crazy. I’ve never seen so many photographers just come out of the shadows at the Met and take her picture. And of course she was in every newspaper the next day, and they’ve been printing it in the last 50 years, over and over again. But it was just amazing. People were horrified, they thought, that’s not fashion, she’s just naked at the Metropolitan.

SCARABELLI: [Laughs] I love it. 

MACKIE: And then all of a sudden they put it in Vogue magazine. That was in December, and then by February Cher was in that dress on the cover of Time. How often do you get a girl that looks like that, dressed like that, on the cover of Time magazine? Usually it was some funny old Russian man who everybody hated, so it was just the weirdest thing. They were pulling them off the newsstands in the South and tearing off the front cover, it was just shocking.

SCARABELLI: How did you feel when that happened?

MACKIE: I thought it was funny. I was so surprised it was even there, she was supposed to wear something entirely different. And whoever the publisher was, looked at that other picture of Richard Avedon’s and went, “Let’s put this on the cover, we’ll sell more of these.” [Laughs] And she loved it. But that’s easy when you have that figure and that exotic look that nobody else had in Hollywood. Everyone was all blonde with flips and beehives, nobody looked like her. We were getting huge audiences for the show, people who were there just to see what she was going to wear.

SCARABELLI: I mean, it was such a revolutionary moment in time for fashion. As she says in the documentary, “No one had seen a belly button on television before.”

MACKIE: One day the censor came in and said, “This’ll never work. I can see her under boob.” Cher didn’t care. And I said, “Well, why don’t you just stand her on her head and then it’ll be cleavage?” And they all got very nervous and left. And then the producer said, “Leave her alone. Our ratings are over the top. People are watching like crazy.” And we never changed a thing after that, ever.

SCARABELLI: So do you think about that as a form of liberation, or was it a new kind of exploitation? Or both?

MACKIE: It’s all those things, but at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with it. Everybody’s got a navel somewhere. People were watching her like crazy. And she had the best guest stars. When you have Tina Turner on as a guest, how much better can it get?

SCARABELLI: And you dressed her too. It’s incredible to watch that back, it feels like that kind of talent is hard to come by today. 

MACKIE: It’s different. But the performers are younger and braver and they’ve watched a lot of the old stuff. That’s how all these young Disney girls, these famous girls who’ve  been wearing some of my old clothes discover me. That’s where Miley Cyrus found that dress that she wore on the Grammys. She used to be just a little hillbilly girl, and now she’s a grown woman and she’s amazing. Those little kids that love to perform, by the time they’re grown up they are shot out of a cannon, it’s just amazing to watch.

SCARABELLI: Are you particular about who you dress nowadays or who you’ll give access to your archive?

MACKIE: I try to be. I love to dress people that I’m a little bit infatuated with their performance, and I think, oh, she’s interesting. Look at her. You just can’t help it. They’re in their own world and they know they are. They know they’re good. They learn about lighting, they learn about makeup. Look at Zendaya.

SCARABELLI: Incredible.

MACKIE: She was on Dancing with the Stars when she was like, 14 or something, and I thought, this girl should be a star.

SCARABELLI: I want to ask you—

MACKIE: I’m sorry I’m so enthusiastic.

SCARABELLI: No, it’s fabulous. I feel the same way about Zendaya and Miley. But I wanted to ask you, were you ever looking at high fashion on the runways? How did that influence your work?

MACKIE: I always wanted to work in show business, as a little kid. When I was five and six, I would go to the movies with my mother and my teenage sister, and all the way home on the streetcar I would ask my mother questions, like, “Why did they wear those long dresses?”  My favorite was Meet Me in St. Louis, which took place at the turn of the century. At that age, I just thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. Judy was phenomenal and sang beautifully, of course. That was my favorite movie until I was 10 or 11, and then I started moving up to more sophisticated musicals.

SCARABELLI: So it was always more about the storytelling and the fantasy for you. You wouldn’t go to the department store and see the dresses and get the same feeling? 

MACKIE: I’d go and I’d look, and that was okay, whatever. But when you have a teenage sister—I knew all the movie star’s names because she would talk about it all the time. I wasn’t interested in being a baseball player or any of that, I would just draw all day. And when television came in I watched television, but that wasn’t until I was about 12 or 13.

SCARABELLI: That’s amazing. And then you get to a point where you find success and other designers are looking to your costuming to influence them. Are you even paying attention to that or just doing your own thing?

MACKIE: I had friends that I had met in the fashion world of New York, and they said, “You couldn’t give away a halter dress to department stores until Cher started wearing them, and then you couldn’t make enough after that.” And of course then the skirts got really short, and by the time we got to hot pants, it was just a disaster because that isn’t good for everybody, and everybody was wearing them. [Laughs] But then all of a sudden Cher had gone off and started making movies, and making them well. She was automatically a good actress, as Diana Ross was a good actress when she started doing movies, and Liza Minnelli was a good actress when she was doing those films. It’s interesting, when those creatures that want to be in show business—look out—it’s almost dangerous.

SCARABELLI: It’s incredible. I mean, they just have it and it doesn’t matter what genre they’re working in. Do you have a favorite moment or look that you’ve done? 

MACKIE: I like anything that’s tempting me or teasing me into using a subject that I wouldn’t think of otherwise, or a period that I’ve never designed for. All of a sudden everybody is a very fabulous clown in a costume, but yet they’re flattering in an odd way. 

SCARABELLI: So you appreciate anything that’s more of a challenge for you—

MACKIE: A challenge for me, but also for the performers. They often get put into one little place in the world and people only ask them to do that. They only sing one kind of song. And when you give them a chance to spread out and be funny, or be sexier than usual, it’s like magic. When Bernadette Peters first came on television, she was a teenager on The Carol Burnett Show, and she was adorable and funny and could tap dance and sing and had a beautiful little body. 

SCARABELLI: She was fabulous.

MACKIE: Yeah.

SCARABELLI: Wait, I just had something I was going to ask you. 

MACKIE: I’ve just been talking your head off, I’m sorry.

SCARABELLI: Oh, no, I love it. 

SPEAKER 3: We have to jump off in five minutes only because it’s—

SCARABELLI: Okay, five minutes. Perfect.

MACKIE: Go ahead.

SCARABELLI: I was going to ask you about collaborators but I also want to talk about Elton John. I think what you did with him was such a big moment. In the same as Cher—

MACKIE: She definitely inspired him. She was on a show with him and I made him costumes with silver and sequin balls and top hats. He loved it, and after that show, he said, “Do you think you could ever do some clothes just for me?” I said, “Well, what do you want? And he said, “A costume like Cher wears.'” And I went, “Yeah, sure. I can do that for you. You’ll be the new age Liberace.” [Laughs] He was up for it. I love what he said later. He says, “You know if I hadn’t started dressing up, I don’t think my career would ever have been the same.”

SCARABELLI: It’s probably true.

MACKIE: I think it is.

SCARABELLI: But was it also groundbreaking at the time to put a man in this more feminine, flamboyant clothes?

MACKIE: Well, they weren’t girl clothes, they were fancy boy clothes.

SCARABELLI: That’s true.

MACKIE: They were like Charles Dickens costumes from another planet. He inspired me. I loved the way he looked. I loved the way he talked. He wore his big glasses. And he always wore a hat, because he was probably losing his hair at that point. He would come to California and I would draw him 10 sketches and say, “Which one would you like?” And he’d say, “I want them all.”

SCARABELLI: And now we have pop stars like Benson Boone and Harry Styles wearing these crazy—

MACKIE: I don’t understand him, but maybe I’m too old. I don’t get it.

SCARABELLI: Say more.

MACKIE: I think Harry’s quite talented, I watched him perform and everything, but I don’t like what he wears. I don’t think it looks sexy or masculine in a good way. It’s just kind of…I don’t know. 

SCARABELLI: What do you think about men’s red carpet dressing these days?

MACKIE: I think it’s really silly. Sometimes the guys will know exactly why they look so amazing and wear it and look good, but they’ve got to be a bit of a FOP to pull that off, in a good way. But sometimes they just look stupid because they’re trying too hard to be different from the other guys. And tuxedos all look alike, for the most part, so it’s hard.

SCARABELLI: Okay. Last question. I have to ask you this, I’m sorry. What do you think of Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress?

MACKIE: Do you know how many people asked me that question?

SCARABELLI: [Laughs]

MACKIE: I did the sketch for Jean-Louis. I knew it was for Marilyn, but I didn’t know it was to sing to the president, that was a whole other thing. And it was exciting that she was there and did it. But that’s her dress, it’s nobody else’s, it should be in a museum somewhere. That’s all.

SCARABELLI: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me.

MACKIE: My pleasure. I hope we get to talk again.

SCARABELLI: Me too. I love hearing your stories.

MACKIE: I feel like Chatty Cathy or something. I just never stopped.

SCARABELLI: Please keep going. We need these stories, it’s very inspiring. And thank you for blessing us with so many beautiful clothes over the years.

MACKIE: Thank you.