I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  * * *

  As long as I was working, I was able to keep my anxiety relatively under control. So I worked and worked with laser focus all day. Then suddenly the day would be over and everyone would leave and I would feel especially lonely and very scared of the emptiness. The more “success” I had, the more surreal it felt and the less I connected to anything outside of work. The more people I hired, the more terrifying it was having all that responsibility. And I didn’t feel right talking about it because I was afraid saying anything would undermine people’s confidence in me and suggest I was unable to deal with the pressures of success. I also worried about the level of sympathy my complaints would yield. I mean—talking about how difficult it is being a media darling and making clothes for rich, famous people could easily make me sound like a complete asshole. So I kept it to myself.

  One night I was dining with Avedon in his great kitchen. I confided in him about this increasing emotional turmoil, and he practically demanded that I get back into therapy. He spoke proudly of the fact that he was in analysis four or five times a week. I thought, If I could afford to be in analysis four times a week, I wouldn’t need it. But I knew he was right. It had been five or six years since I’d been in therapy, a record for me, and if there ever was a time I needed it, it was then.

  My first shrink, Dr. Mossey, helped me get through yeshiva. And Dr. Kahn guided me through my late teenage years and helped me come out. So I took Dick’s advice and started seeing a shrink again, and it helped. But what helped me more than anything were my constant consultations with various astrologers, tarot card readers, numerologists, mediums, and psychics. When you consider it’s part of a fashion designer’s job description to predict what everyone’s going to want to wear, it’s not so far-fetched that we sometimes get a kick out of listening to others’ predictions. The first reading I ever had was when I was eighteen. The psychic’s name was Guy Culver. I called him Madam Guy and we dated for a short time. The first thing he asked at the reading was, “Why did you leave show business?” I didn’t really consider the weight of the question, because I’d convinced myself that I was doing the right thing. But the more I tried to justify it, the less Guy believed me. He said, “If by the time you’re thirty you don’t pursue a career in show business, it will pursue you.”

  The greatest advisor of my life was an astrologer named Maria Napoli. I started seeing her also when I was eighteen, a little after I had my first readings with Guy. She was astrologer to the fashion stars. She read for Donna Karan and her entire staff. She read for Norma Kamali. She read for Perry Ellis and everyone in that studio, which is what led me to her. I saw Maria religiously, at least three times a year, and only recently did she stop due to illness. I always felt happy when I left a reading with Maria. She could turn bad news into a win. Six months before my father died she mentioned that I’d experience one of the great nadirs of my life, but that it would ultimately be a breakthrough for me, and on the other side of the sadness would be great self-awareness. I guess in psychic terms, you’d call that a good bedside manner.

  She lived at the same apartment building on West Seventy-eighth Street for the entire thirty-five years I consulted with her. Her living room had one shaded window facing a brick wall and was packed with stuff. Furniture. All kinds of pillows and throws. Bookshelves so laden with old books and so embedded in the space they felt like structural elements. Ratty old shoe boxes filled with stuff, and two or three Hermès Kelly bags mixed in with the chaos. Also mixed in were shopping bags from Manolo Blahnik, Bergdorf Goodman, little bags from various tea shops (Maria loves tea) filled with scarves, papers, cans of food, half-filled notebooks. I could barely fit through the door, which wouldn’t open all the way because of the piles of books and papers. I’d step gingerly through the sea of stuff to the one seat in the room that wasn’t piled with folders, scraps, pamphlets. It was opposite where she sat at a small, round table covered with a collection of crystals and half-burned candles that had never been dusted. Among the mess was a little Maltese named Fluffy, who had a high-pitched yelp and would bark for about ten minutes when you first entered, and whom she lovingly referred to as “Demon from hell.” When Fluffy died she immediately replaced him with Fluffy II, who looked and sounded exactly like Fluffy, with slightly worse manners. Both dogs seemed to know the exact time in the session to suddenly yap—a terrifying jolt, usually in the most engrossing part of the reading.

  After about fifteen minutes of Maria opining as to who made the best tuna salad in the city and where the best sample sales had been that week, finally the reading would begin. She had a Panasonic cassette tape player that she’d use to record the readings, and the first thing you’d do when you got there was hand her the cassette tape you brought. If the reading led to something particularly searing or gossipy she’d pause the tape and resume after the subject was fully discussed. Toward the end of the time I saw her, cassette tapes were more and more difficult to find, and yet I persevered. I have so many of these tapes from Maria—for that matter, I have recordings of all the readings I’ve had my entire life, all dutifully marked with dates and stored in chronological order in a huge box. The irony is that as fastidious as I was about capturing the readings, I never once listened to any of those tapes.

  Of course, there are psychics who come highly recommended and who just stink. Early on in my career the photographer Bruce Weber sent me to a woman who told me I did “everything wrong” and that she “couldn’t help me—no one could.” I still hear those words ringing in my head today, any time I want to believe my life is a failure. There was a guy in LA who worked with past lives who said to me, “If anyone asks who taught you to play the piano, tell them Mozart.” Another was a Kabbalistic astrologer, a rebbetzen living in Queens. She told me I was “going to meet a nice Jewish girl and have a son and a daughter and make your mother very happy. You were born to study the Kabbala, and you were born to support the Kabbala Center. That’ll be two hundred and fifty dollars. Thank you.”

  Once, in my midthirties, a friend offered to read my tarot cards. We sat on the floor of the loft he was living in temporarily. It was sunny and hot in the apartment even though it was freezing cold and wintery outside. For the reading he used a strange deck that I didn’t recognize—a Mexican tarot deck, his specialty. I threw the cards and he predicted a lot of very relevant things. At the end he pointed to a card that, like many of the Mexican cards, I had never seen before. According to him, it was the resolution, the fate card. It wasn’t part of a suit like rods or cups. It didn’t seem to have a moon or sun or any planetary attribute. It was a picture of a man on a stage, a minstrel dandy in a cutaway coat, straw boater, spats, holding a cane, wearing blackface makeup. He was singing and dancing. My friend turned to me and said: “You’re in for big surprises. No matter what you think about your future, you’re going back on the stage. This card. This is your destiny.”

  25

  A great feature of my first tiny apartment was that the door to the bathroom had a full-length mirror, and by chance I discovered that I could pivot it so that it reflected the TV and I could sit in the tub and watch my beloved Sony Trinitron in mirror image. One of my favorite things was watching Jeopardy! while soaking in the tub, the TV on mute, reading the clues backwards, and answering in the form of a question.

  I had returned from a trunk show in Chicago late one day and was snuggled in my tub, the evening news on TV, awaiting Jeopardy!, when suddenly Grace Mirabella’s picture appeared on TV backwards. Twitter wasn’t a gleam in the eye yet, news in those days didn’t break in dribs and drabs, it broke all at once, like a big crystal punch bowl hitting the living room floor, which is what this felt like. Grace was the editor of Vogue for seventeen years and a supporter and a friend. I jumped out of the tub, and turned on the sound in time to hear that she’d been fired from Vogue. Rumors had been circulating that Mirabella was not long for the job, people had bets out that any number of people, including Jade Hobson and Rochelle Udell,
would replace her, each with a hundred obvious reasons to succeed to the position. But the big surprise was that Anna Wintour was chosen as her replacement.

  I had first met Anna about eight years earlier when she worked at New York magazine. My friend Peter won designer of the year at Parsons, and she came up to Perry Ellis to interview me about him. When she took the job at Vogue I was afraid she would see me as an invention of Grace Mirabella’s and want nothing to do with me. But after a few months she came to my studio for a preview of the fall season, which I was about to show. I was nervous but she seemed to be nervous, too, which was a surprise. This was someone who was already being portrayed as an Ice Queen in the press.

  She always came for previews very early in the mornings because she lives on the border of Greenwich Village and SoHo, two blocks away from my studio, and it was a logical start to her day. Dawn Brown, a young woman who worked for me in public relations, was charged with filling platters with gorgeous baked things from epicurean bakeries I would specify, and then laying them out for Anna and her accompanying editors. The platters would go untouched—none of them, especially Anna, was too big on breakfast.

  That first morning Anna arrived at least fifteen minutes early and without a word of apology, as though it was something to be expected. She smiled a lot that morning. In those days she smiled and laughed and even took her legendary dark sunglasses off from time to time. She asked about my family, about movies I liked and books I was reading. After the third or fourth meeting she started asking me about my love life and was setting me up on dates. It seemed our chatter was never about fashion, it was friendly. Her opinion began to matter in my life as much as in my work, and she was the most important presence at my shows. I can remember being backstage my entire career, in the scrum of it, dressing girls, tweaking, retying, rebuckling but, more important, checking with Nina, who was checking with Anna’s people about her ETA. When Anna sat, the show started.

  She invited me to her house for dinners, and at first I wasn’t sure whether they were social or something else. I’d arrive and usually there was a pretty girl standing at the door in a small black dress with high heels and a clipboard. Over time there were more and more of these dinners, which defined themselves as a sort of salon—a changeable Algonquin roundtable of moderns from diverse fields. Designers were there to meet writers, politicians, artists. Anna made this effort to integrate fashion and make it feel less insular. Often after dinner she would initiate a conversation among the three or four tables in her dining room. Joan Didion. Oscar de la Renta. Jay McInerney. Nora Ephron. Sarah Jessica Parker. Valentino. Salman Rushdie. Charlie Rose. George Clooney. Mixed in with new society girls who were being ushered into Vogue. Lauren duPont and Aerin Lauder. I sat next to people as diverse as Judy Peabody, Robert Downey Jr., Dr. Mathilde Krim, and Marianne Faithfull. One night I sat next to Irving Penn, way before he took my picture. (Anna commissioned the photo for Vogue, and he sent me a print. For all the years I worked with Avedon, I couldn’t even arrange to buy a print of the New Yorker portrait he did of me.) Mr. Penn (who, unlike Dick, did not answer to Irving or Irv, only Mr. Penn) and I discovered we lived a block away from each other in the Village, and we walked home together after those dinners on several occasions. He started calling me Maestro, and I imagined it was because he either couldn’t remember my name or he called everyone that.

  One night the new First Lady, Hillary Clinton, was Anna’s guest of honor. After dinner Mrs. Clinton took all kinds of serious questions about the intentions of the coming administration—topics from health care to the Middle East. She had just finished an earnest answer about the future of the school system, when I called out: “But what the hell are you going to wear?” Hillary laughed and the room relaxed. Anna loved that, I think.

  Among this changeable feast of power and society Anna mixed in her favorite people, like socialites Anne McNally and landscape designer Miranda Brooks. Anna’s husband at the time, Dr. David Shaffer, was always around, too, and eventually it became almost familial—these were people I expected to see once every two or three months at dinner. I saw Anna regularly for lunches, preview meetings, or at galas, where I was often seated next to her—including a number of times at the Met ball, which was becoming an increasingly important item on her agenda. Two weeks after 9/11 there was a gala that had been planned for New Yorkers for Children, another of her then causes, at Cipriani 42nd Street. There was a fear that no one would show up, afraid of the physical dangers, not to mention the implications of being seen in public after such a devastation. Anna used the event as a kind of social call to arms. She didn’t tolerate cancellations from her editors, who were justifiably afraid to fly to the European collections, and she didn’t tolerate cowardice from people who were cancelling on her dinner that night. Her office made special calls to guests; I was informed that I was coming and sitting next to her. And it was a great night. Everyone showed up. Streisand was there and the mayor made an appearance, and it was a huge first step in the city’s social recovery.

  Each month a new issue of the magazine would come, hand delivered from Anna with a note on her personal stationery stuck in the middle: “Isaac, I hope you like your pages.” or “Congratulations, darling, I hope you love your cover” scribbled in her handwriting, which looks like an impatient child’s. I saved every one of those notes somewhere. But more than anything I waited after each collection to get Anna’s list of the clothes she wanted for herself. Buying pieces from the collection was her greatest compliment to me. She loved color. And anything with fur trim. She wore a brown suede embroidered cocktail dress with fringe more than once, and there was a black sequin parka that she wore regularly and was photographed in several times. Nothing made me feel as right about my life as Anna’s personal approval.

  I’d accompany her to events, like a dinner to raise money for suicide awareness, and another that helped victims of domestic abuse among so many other galas. She enlisted me to emcee the first Vogue Awards in 1995. As charitable and ambitious as she is, she’s impatient with long, boring speeches, which was always a bonus. If you were her date or you sat at her table at one of the many galas, you were in and out in under ninety minutes.

  She could be pushy with her generosity. Once, after an exhausting collection, all I really wanted to do was stay in bed, but she insisted I fly to Washington to attend a party she was giving for Princess Diana, whose attention every editor around the globe competed for. We often went to the theatre together, including to both parts of Angels in America, the best plays I ever saw. When she took up the VH1 fashion awards as one of her personal projects, she hired me to design the production. I worked with a set designer who didn’t want to listen to a word I said. I was trying to create a minimal white set with a huge projection, and what they had planned was the opposite—everything but the kitchen sink. I had to quit the job twice, and Anna had to step in on my behalf to get the set I wanted.

  She was really concerned for my happiness, always asking about men I was dating. Also making note of my weight, congratulating me when I was thin and teasing me when I wasn’t. Her presence at my thirtieth birthday party was as important to me as Nina’s, Peter’s, or Kevin’s. She sat across from me that night and smiled or rolled her eyes when someone made a stupid toast. I think she was as genuinely amused by me as I was by her. Also we were protective of each other. Like anyone in a position of power she has a lot of detractors, and I tried to deflect as much of that as possible. One afternoon early in 2005 I ran into Meryl Streep, who lived up the block from my place in the Village. By that time I’d made her some clothes and had gotten to know her daughter, Mamie Gummer. Streep said, “I agreed to play Anna Wintour. Am I crazy?” She was referring to the upcoming movie version of The Devil Wears Prada. “First of all, I have to lose about fifty pounds. Second of all, what do I know about the fashion business?” Then she asked if I’d look at the script and give the producers and writers some notes. Before I agreed I took Anna to lunch to pass t
he idea by her. I hadn’t read the book, but I knew it was a kind of satire, and I didn’t know if Anna might think of it as a betrayal if I helped in any way. There were all kinds of rumors so I broached the subject gingerly, but she had the opposite reaction to what I expected. She seemed delighted and told me not to hesitate. I was inspired by how she was able to see herself as a subject and not let her personal feelings enter into it.

  Much later on, in 2003, when I launched my Target collection and reopened my couturier, Anna supported those endeavors, too. I had lunch with her and explained the idea and, as always, she nodded in agreement. Even if she had doubts as to the viability of the idea she never did anything but encourage, giving me a big story in the magazine. Three full pages with a consecutive page of text and a tiny inset picture. I wrote her a note and sent flowers thanking her for the “three gorgeous pages,” and I got a note back in her hasty scrawl saying, “Yes, darling, but the story was four pages.”

  In 2005 I arranged a lunch to introduce my boyfriend (now husband) Arnold to Anna. She and her companion, Shelby Bryan, met us at Da Silvano, a restaurant in the Village that was a hub for the glitterati until its recent closing. She scrutinized Arnold like a protective sister. She seemed genuinely happy for us and said, “Isaac, now you can have kids.” It was the one and only time we all went out.

  Our friendship hit a few snags along the way. I was jealous of others she paid attention to. And if she didn’t like a collection, it hurt. Finally, about six years ago, I was backstage and asked with my usual angst about whether the important editors were in place. Anna wasn’t there yet; I assumed that she was detained. But after about twenty minutes it was obvious she wasn’t coming and we filled the seat. It was a blow. I took it as a sign that my years as a couturier were waning.