I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  When I announced my doors were closing, instead of my fantasy editorial, an article ran on the front page of the Times, accompanied by a picture of me. The only redeeming thing about it was that I looked thin (more redeeming than you’d imagine). The headline was one of the most memorable of my life, etched in my brain forever, like a premature obituary. It said: Designer Most Likely to Succeed, Doesn’t. I perceived that not for what it meant literally, but as a sign of hope, a real end to things and a beginning for others. I didn’t understand it would be seen as a failure, even after that headline, which appeared, I repeat, on the front page!

  Women’s Wear Daily devoted pages and pages to the story with accompanying pictures, as though my clothes were some sort of war heroes. That morning in early November 1998, I assembled my entire company and broke the news. I cried and thanked them. That night Mark and I were Anna’s guests at a party for Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake on Broadway. I considered canceling but thought it best to just face the world. The funny thing was that through all the potential shame and sadness, I felt amazingly free and resolved. It was only later, at a reading with Maria Napoli where she pointed out that I was going through a “public humiliation,” that I actually grasped what was happening. That night at the show with Anna and Mark I was actually surprised that the world didn’t perceive it as the end of a jail sentence the way I did. Those days afterwards I felt the way I did in high school, like I could finally breathe.

  I permitted one interview with the New York Observer, through which I concealed my relief and excitement and feigned a kind of regret, if only to maintain friendships with people to whom I thought I owed that remorse. It would hardly seem sporting to say how happy I was to be moving on after all those people supported me in making it to the top. To the rest of the world, this was a disaster. The phone rang off the hook. It was the time of the answering machine, before caller ID, so for months I would wait to hear a voice before picking up the phone. One friend kept leaving me messages. The first was something along the lines of:

  “Darling. So sad to hear about you closing your doors. Call me back.” Beep.

  His second message, a week later, was:

  “Darling. I hope you’re okay. Why haven’t you called me back!?” Beep.

  The third, a month later:

  “Darling. Why the hell are you not calling me back? I just want to hear your voice and tell you how sorry I am!” BEEEEP.

  I’ve always been really good at knowing the difference between my own paranoia and people’s intentions. And I got very good at perceiving the subtle differences between genuine concern and schadenfreude. There were, of course, people who honestly cared about me. There were others who were more interested in gloating about what they viewed as my demise.

  * * *

  Then a stroke of fate. At exactly the right time a young lady emerged in my life, like Joan of Arc, a saint in shining armor. Marisa Gardini had worked for Raoul Felder as a divorce lawyer, then moved to Vienna with her husband, Craig Kinosian, also a lawyer. When they moved back she decided she wanted to get into fashion and entertainment law. Her sister Gina Gardini was working with Miramax during the launch of Unzipped and recommended Marisa for a job with Nina. Marisa ascended the ranks from intern in the PR department; a few short years later she was running human resources. When we closed she stayed on to help with the exit packages.

  During that transition she’d appear regularly at my apartment for my signature on contracts and documents. We struck up a rapport. After the official closing there was so much to do, and we agreed that we’d continue working together. At first I thought of her as an associate, an incredibly bright person who seemed to have a lot of the right qualifications—mostly that she was enthusiastic about working with me. We lunched at Japonica and made plans. There was a deal with DreamWorks to develop my graphic novel, The Adventures of Sandee the Supermodel. There was a deal with HBO to develop a series based on my life. There was a deal with Oxygen to do a talk show. There was even one very successful shoe license that had been signed too late in the game and had not been terminated. She helped with these projects, and she was smart and straightforward. Respectful but honest. Her lack of experience didn’t faze me, and eventually I thought of it as a bonus. Again naiveté was power. She didn’t know what couldn’t be done, so anything was possible.

  Within about three months she approached me with her husband, saying they could win my trademark back from Chanel based on a few assumptions she made after looking at the original agreement. Before she brought up the subject I had turned my back completely on the idea, but she convinced me that I should win back the right to use my own name. We embarked on a long, arduous, nerve-wracking battle, and after three years she and her husband succeeded in winning the suit. That was when Marisa and I formalized our partnership, which lasted the next sixteen years.

  * * *

  I reveled in freedom after closing my doors. It was a new world with time to do things, to go to the gym, and buy groceries, and go to the movies. And mostly the freedom to pursue my first love: show business. On top of all the entertainment projects I was working on, I had a few stray things, including writing for InStyle magazine and designing costumes for Twyla Tharp at New York City Ballet. Even with all the meetings and management of my projects I had a lot of extra time, and I began writing things. Essays. Stories. I did a lot of journaling. I created a routine around it. I’d stay up all night writing then wake really late (a whole complicated way of dealing with insomnia), go to the gym, eat lunch, spend the afternoon on calls, and start writing again after dinner. There were days when I couldn’t write a word and others when I couldn’t stop. It became an anchor that gave my life a shape.

  I wrote a number of small, funny essays that were more like rants or screeds. What they really felt like were monologues, scripts on random subjects such as “travel” or “men” or “mother.” By that point I had assembled pages and pages of them. And it seemed like a good time to start putting together a one-man show. I gave these essays to my friend, a producer named Dori Berinstein, who had worked on Unzipped. She liked them a lot, and she loved the idea of my attempting a live show. One thing I was clear about was that music had to play a big part in it. Maybe harkening back to my days as a female impersonator and a performing-arts student, singing felt like the perfect form of theatrical expression, and I was determined to sing.

  I met Stephen Sondheim at a dinner party at my friend Jonathan Sheffer’s one night, shortly after the release of Unzipped. Steve was a big fan of the movie and we became friends. To have grown up idolizing him to such a degree, and then to have him tell me what a fan he was of my work, and then to engage in this friendship for those few years felt like I was living a kind of fated miracle. Steve was about sixty then and was emerging into another realm of great public appreciation. He was finally being fêted as the king of musical theatre. He was a perfect friend. He was full of great stories and advice. A god with the personality of an imp. A bearded cherub with crazy observational skills who excelled at dinner conversation and who seemed to get a kick out of me, too. He sent typed notes in the mail (all of which I kept), some accompanying copies of obscure tapes of his early work, which I treasured—like a tape of a musical he wrote for TV called Evening Primrose starring Anthony Perkins. Another note accompanying a copy of the original production of Pacific Overtures, which couldn’t be seen anywhere but the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, addressed to “Darling poor old ugly rejected you,” and saying I might be “truly thrilled” by the costumes.

  There were fabulous dinner parties at his house with people like Julie Andrews, Mia Farrow, Judi Dench, William Goldman, and Mary Rodgers. I invited him over to play bridge with my friends, who were in awe of him. He introduced me to Arthur Laurents and I took them to Chanterelle for dinner, where Laurents berated me for most of the night because I made the mistake of expressing occasional impatience in the theatre. I invited Steve over to meet Mark Morris, another force
d meeting that somehow went awry. Mark was never the best at making first impressions, and the two seemed to clash on every subject. Steve and Robert Osborne, our mutual friend, regaled me with stories about old Hollywood one night at dinner, and after Steve saw a revival of The Women that I costumed on Broadway he left me a message saying something to the effect that he was rarely “moved” by costumes, but in this case he really was. I walked on air for weeks after that. Steve had an adoring acolyte in me, and in him I had a friend, a giant who affected me more with two words than a torrent of words from anyone else.

  I’m not exactly sure what went wrong in our friendship, but at some point I was excommunicated. I think it was something I did or said inadvertently that caused Steve some kind of pain or embarrassment. I confirmed the radio silence when I saw his assistant (also named Steve) in the Village and confronted him. “Did Steve dump me?” I asked semijokingly, and his face clouded up. “Hmm” was all he said, and he walked on.

  But before I was excommunicated, Sondheim had introduced me to a young musician named Peter Jones. Peter and I worked on some musical arrangements together. We got along well and had similar ideas and tastes in musical theatre. After a few weeks of rehearsal I felt I was ready to dip a toe into the water, and so I booked three nights at Eighty-Eights, the small cabaret in the West Village where I’d gone a few times with Liza. I had debilitating stage fright before that gig. Stage fright plagues me to this day. It feels like facing my own death. But the pleasure I took in preparing for those shows was deep. I wrote in my journal, “I am living every day in a more intense way than before. Doing more. Letting go more. Feeling more, both poles, ecstasy and dread.”

  I started the show walking through the audience singing a Cy Coleman song called “You Fascinate Me So” with wonderful tricky lyrics by Carolyn Leigh. I thought I’d mess it up, but I nailed it every time. After that opening, the rest always felt like a cinch. A good lesson for future shows: If you make the right entrance, you’ve won. Even if fear overtakes you later in the set, it’s not half as bad as appearing nervous at first. If the audience senses you’re nervous they’ll eat you alive. You have to appear to be having fun, and the best way to do that is to actually have fun. In order for me to do that, I knew that a lot of the show would have to be extemporaneous. No matter how much I prepare, I think of myself as best in the moment, when I can incorporate things that pop up, and connect with the audience on the spot. The trickiest part of pulling that show together, which has proven the trickiest part of putting any show together, was deciding what to prepare and what to leave to chance.

  One night Liza came to see my show at Eighty-Eights. Her presence should have made me feel even more nervous, but it actually made me feel more confident. I think it’s because she knew how hard I was working on it, how earnestly I had thrown myself into it—and because she did it herself, she understood how hard it could be. I gave a great show that night in that little club, because I really let things happen rather than feeling beholden to patter that I had written in advance. And I accomplished the impossible that night, which was to wrest the audience’s attention away from her and focus it on myself. Afterwards, backstage, Liza said, “Kid, that was more terrific than I expected.” Then she gave me a hilarious and baffling note about my rendition of “Think Pink!,” which I did early in the set. It’s a Roger Edens tune that Liza’s godmother, Kay Thompson, originated in the movie Funny Face. Liza said, “Kid, when you sing the word pink, think rose.” That’s all she said. No more explanation. And yet I completely got her meaning and that sentence went into my permanent collection of favorite Liza-isms.

  Les MIZrahi, which was at first a joke title and later became the actual title of my one-man show, had a few false starts. I workshopped it first with Moisés Kaufman, and then later, for a longer time, with Joe Mantello. But it wasn’t till my friend Wendall Harrington brought it to the attention of Douglas Carter Beane and Mike Rosenberg, who were running a small theatre company called Drama Dept., that it really took shape. We struck a deal for a workshop production, and within a few weeks I was at the Greenwich House Theater (now called the Barrow Street Theatre), working on my show.

  I got the idea to ask Richard Move to direct me after working with him as an emcee for one of his great shows at a downtown club called Mother. Working with Richard on his show made it clear to me that show business wasn’t only a matter of stardust and stage effects. It was broken down into steps, ones involving hard work and development. All my recent experience, working with those other directors, working at Eighty-Eights, working on Richard’s show, proved to me that if I faced my fears, I might be capable of creating something significant. Richard reassured me of my powers, of the powers of rehearsal, and a lot of my neuroses fell away the harder I worked. I engaged in one of the most fortunate relationships of my life with someone named Ben Waltzer, who I met through Mark’s friend Ethan Iverson. Ben became my musical director and accompanist, and it was only after I met Ben that I felt right about my ability to produce music on a stage. Appearing with him also cut my debilitating stage fright in half. It was at that time that I was able to see myself, finally, as a subject. I was thin and agile from all the physical challenges, and I created costumes for myself, which was a real novelty. I wore tails from Savile Row in one segment, a Sulka polka-dotted smoking robe in another, and a suit that was covered from top to bottom in crystals—including the shoes (women’s shoes I bought at Comme des Garçons)—for the finale. I changed costumes behind a light-box screen onstage, like a stripper, with my silhouette for all to see.

  The opening number was a Sondheim song called “Me and My Town” from a show called Anyone Can Whistle. I wrote a new set of lyrics, which turns into a big call and response number with the band. I wanted Steve’s blessing so I sent him these new lyrics, and he seemed not to hate them—which from Steve, who is notoriously critical, felt like praise. Of all the terrifying things I’ve done onstage, the most fearsome came right after that number. A sewing machine would be wheeled out onto the stage, and I would proceed to cut out and sew a coat, one of my favorite designs from my first collection, all the while performing a monologue about being at Loehmann’s with my mother. I was like one of those Chinese acrobats spinning plates while riding a bicycle. I argued and argued with Richard about it, trying to convince him that it was impossible, but he finally won. And it was a real standout in the show as well as a lesson to me about what I was capable of learning. I proved to myself that with the right amount of preparation I could be called upon to do anything onstage that the most seasoned performer could. Also that improvement is cumulative. One gets better and better. One’s voice opens up after time, and it’s easier and easier to rip one’s heart out and leave it onstage. The only trick is you have to keep at it. Keep doing it all the time.

  Getting those audiences to love me night after night felt like slaying dragons. The physical exertion of working on that show was therapeutic. I was eating anything I wanted and down to a size 30 waist. I was finally onstage and not behind it or seated in front of it. It made other disappointments and frustrations seem unimportant. For all the stage fright in advance and the sleeplessness afterwards, the rewards of that time, working in that little theatre every night, with my darling band, playing to those smart audiences, made me understand how simple and good life could be.

  * * *

  During the run of my one-man show I felt lighter and younger—actually attractive. Finally I felt like my body was as sexy as anyone else’s. I began experimenting with sex and meeting lots of men. It was thrilling to feel a little out of control and have a belated slutty phase. I spent many a sleepless night on the Sex Line, which was a telephone precursor to Grindr. After you called in, you would be directed to a series of brief chats with all the other men on the line, and you could beep from one caller to the next if you’d had enough. And they could beep off, too. Mostly the conversations were very short.

  “Hi. What are you looking for?”

&nb
sp; “A bear top”—BEEP! On to the next caller …

  “Hi. I’m on the Upper East Side—BEEP!

  “Hi. I’m six-foot-two, twenty-six, blond, mostly smooth”—BEEP!

  And so on.

  They’d say what they were looking for and what they looked like in short, broad strokes until two people sounded right to each other, and they would take the conversation further and further until they decided to meet up—or at least exchange phone numbers to engage in phone sex that didn’t cost seven dollars a minute. I met a lot of fascinating people this way. Also a lot of frauds. And even this happened: One night at about 2:00 A.M. I was beeping from caller to caller when I stopped to chat with a random gentleman. We were on the line for a good long time, and it seemed we were well matched. Finally we got down to the idea of meeting up, and when I asked where he was he told me the East Twenties. Suddenly it got clearer why the voice on the other end sounded familiar. Then it came rushing at me.

  “Mark? Is that you?”

  And with great alarm, almost hysteria, the voice on the other end answered, “WHO IS THIS!?”

  It turned out my best friend Mark Morris and I were closer to each other’s sexual fantasy that night than we might have guessed. We spoke on the phone for an hour after that, mostly screaming with laughter. I was working on costumes for his company at that time, and the next day when I went to his studio for fittings, I learned Mark had told the story in class to his dancers—we joked and laughed about that for years.