I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  Really, the best part of having this crazy sex life wasn’t so much the sexual gratification as it was having something hilarious to talk about afterwards. So many times I would meet people for fetishy sex just for the experience. Who knows? If I tried something I might like it. I remember my mind’s eye floating up to the ceiling, like a camera, looking at myself in those situations, thinking how easy people with fetishes have it. They simply re-create that particular circumstance and they’re aroused. I also remember most of those times when I wished the guy would stop what he was doing and leave so I could call Mark and describe what had just happened in lurid detail.

  The Sex Line wasn’t my only source for sex. Walking the streets became more than a way of getting from one place to the other or window shopping. Now it became the most interesting place to meet men. There was also the gay beach in East Hampton, which after sundown becomes a cruising spot, mostly for vertical sex. At the gay beach one would occasionally run into men one knew. “Heterosexual” men. Or men known to be in long-standing relationships. Or famous men. There was always the fear of being arrested. One would hear that the police had raided the beach and taken people into the precinct. I thank my lucky stars that nothing like that ever happened to me. Through all those nights I seem to have been lucky in a lot of ways. And for all the danger surrounding the scene—the risk of violence, disease, humiliation—it was a great deal of fun, and I would say worth every minute. The cumulative effect of having been with a number of men who found me attractive was that I finally started to believe I was actually attractive.

  Here and there I would meet someone and date him for a while, but nothing ever stuck. There were men I dated with whom I was compatible in some ways, but not others. There was a wonderful guy, a gorgeous blond, who, after we dated for a bit he told me I had inspired him to go into rehab for heroin addiction. I was set up with a gorgeous fellow named John, who I dated for a long while before we ever had sex, which turned out to be a big disaster. I dated another fellow named Daniel, who I think I had the best sex of my life with, and whom I loved in a lot of ways, but with whom romance was a nonstarter. I tried to make a thing with one guy named James, who liked to have sex in alleys and public bathrooms, but the relationship could never find its footing because it turned out he had a wife. Another was a painter who also worked as a hustler. I tried to convince him that he was a good enough painter to support himself, and his answer was “I like turning tricks,” which I understood to the point of being jealous.

  Going through the motions of dating so much taught me a lot about men and convinced me that love and romance were impossible. I really thought that at the time.

  * * *

  A few weeks after the opening of Les MIZrahi, sometime in October of that year, I was sitting in my apartment late one afternoon after having bought a new toaster. The toaster didn’t mean anything really, but it became a symbol of my self-sufficiency. I wasn’t rich, but I was able to look after myself. I was ecstatic to have made it through my recent history, such a public fall. I had faced stage fright. Conquered the press. And once again, the moment-to-moment of living through it was stressful, to the point of near-misery. But when I looked back, that was the happiest time in my life. This thing that made me so happy, performing onstage, was no longer a mystery. Walking to the theatre in Greenwich Village every evening. Warming up my voice and body. Standing before a crowd every night and working hard. And feeling like I had conquered the world after each and every show.

  Toward the end of the extended run I was aware of the impending void waiting to descend. What could ever replace that show? I had invested every part of my emotional inner life into the creation of it. More than any fashion show I ever made, this was my personality, my ideas, my words, my body on the line. By that point I had many other things on the horizon—a talk show, a pilot I was writing, a movie I was consulting on—but that show was the closest thing to my heart for those two years since I had begun writing the essays. Or really since my earliest dreams of working onstage, in a spotlight.

  Around Thanksgiving it occurred to me that the only thing that might fill the oncoming void was a dog. Another lifelong dream. I imagined a dog would bring constant companionship and loyalty, and a deep, very private love. Also it would be a physical commitment, walking, training, and taking care of this puppy. And so toward the end of my run in Les MIZrahi I began to look in earnest.

  After months and months, I met Harry at a Christmas cocktail party charity event for a local dog shelter. My friend Kitty Hawks had accompanied me to many of the city’s shelters, even once to the pound (where I vowed never to go again because it’s just too sad). That night Kitty brought Harry from his holding crate to meet me and said, “This is your dog.” I immediately knew she was right. A mix of Border collie and golden retriever, he was the most elegant shade of auburn, the color of a red fox. Smart. Also a bit aloof, another good sign. I thought if he didn’t care so much, we stood a better chance of living happily together. I filled out the paperwork that night and couldn’t think of anything else till the following day, when I was set to pick him up. I saw Maira later that night, and I drew a cartoon of him from memory on a slip of paper, which captured his exact countenance. The next day Harry and I walked from the shelter on East Forty-sixth Street to my apartment in the Village. Harry came into the apartment and any trace of aloofness fell away immediately. He ran from room to room and jumped on the bed and on the furniture in a manic fit, as if to say, “Happy to be here!”

  I brought Harry with me to those final few performances of Les MIZrahi. He stayed in my dressing room and was there when I came offstage. Nothing could assuage my dread of moving on from that show, but Harry had a way of changing the subject. He looked at me, and I felt less lonely. A kind of bliss set in between us that lasted the entire sixteen years we lived together. He made my shack in Bridgehampton habitable. Before him, I was much too scared to spend the night there alone. Eventually it became an idyllic retreat for me, and so many happy days and nights there followed—one memory in particular, walking in the moonlight with Harry off-leash, snow up to my knees and up around his snout. Harry was everything to me. After all those years of pining for a man, I was surprised when I got something I considered better. I got a companion who asked no questions and only gave love. It was that secure feeling Harry brought me that led me to understand the true idea of partnership and enabled me to be less desperate and more open.

  After one of the final performances of Les MIZrahi, Isabella Rossellini came backstage and met Harry in my dressing room and said, “Ah. Harry. He is the couture of dogs. Mutts are the only ones of their kind. Not another one like Harry on Earth.”

  30

  Dori Berinstein, a good friend and one of the first producers to get involved with Unzipped, was working with Geraldine Laybourne and Oprah and some other TV executives who had the very avant-garde idea to launch an interactive TV network, right on the cusp of the internet explosion. To their credit, they were a little ahead of the curve. They started the Oxygen network in 1998, and in that incarnation it was poised to be not only the first TV network to acknowledge the World Wide Web in so direct a way, but also the first network targeted specifically to women. Dori and I met for a drink sometime in the fall of 2000 and discussed the idea of creating a talk show together. None of the people involved were true talk-show producers, so we pursued totally original ideas. I wanted to do things with people other than just sit and talk. Being a multitasker myself, I thought talking while doing something would make it more likely for things to get said, revealed. People are off their guard when occupied, and hence more relaxed about revealing things. The pilot episode was centered around fittings on a dress for Sarah Jessica Parker to wear to the opening night of her husband Matthew Broderick’s show The Producers.

  I wanted there to be a musical element to the show, so Ben Waltzer was hired to be on set. He could accompany anyone who might want to spontaneously burst into song. And there were so man
y who really did want to. Jacques Pépin, after deboning a chicken, sang “Les Feuilles Mortes” and Belinda Carlisle and the Go-Go’s, who assembled in the studio for an interview, ended the segment ad-libbing “Vacation” with Ben following along on piano. Debbie Harry and I got through a version of “Heart of Glass” and Lauren Ambrose performed “God Bless the Child” on the spot; and Sandra Bernhard made up a song with Ben about our friendship, her baby, Cicely, sitting on her lap.

  Our first studio was located in a storefront on one of the quieter side streets in Chelsea. I had the idea to set the whole thing in front of a white cyclorama, a wall that curves and becomes the floor—no corners. When photographed it looks like a white void, everything appears to be floating in space. I set a piano and some elegant furniture in front of this cyc, and it looked modern and beautiful. The art directors on the network begged me to rethink the idea, but I wouldn’t budge. They explained how much easier it would be if the set was painted a shade of pale grey that would read on TV as white, an idea I wouldn’t even entertain. The first few airings of the show were so blown out because of the whiteness of the set, we heard from different carriers that people weren’t registering pictures, just blank screens with sounds. Finally the technicians figured out how to transmit the show by some means or other and in the end we succeeded with that white set, and I venture to say started a whole bunch of other “white set” talk shows.

  Most of the guests were friends of mine who I reached out to personally. One of the main reasons we had such great bookings originally was because we gave ourselves flexibility to shoot whenever talent was free. So we kept odd hours but had some amazing guests doing some amazing things. Natalie Portman and I washed my dog, Harry, who was a regular on the show. We followed an Esquire shooting on the set of Zoolander. I made costumes for Baryshnikov. I played Ping-Pong with Janeane Garofalo and pool with Lili Taylor. I did a sewing demonstration with Helen Mirren. I sang with Andrea Martin and we laughed so hard—to the point where the interview went out of control. I supervised a haircut for Rosie O’Donnell and we cried together about Columbine. By the second season of The Isaac Mizrahi Show, New York magazine proclaimed it was “the show to do,” and soon publicists were calling us to get talent booked on.

  At least one-quarter of my seemingly boundless energy at that time was focused on ignoring the call of fashion. All those years an addiction had grown, and now the task was set before me to break the habit without the benefit of a twelve-step program. Even with the TV show taking off and all the new entertainment endeavors, every time a fashion magazine crossed my path, I felt haunted. People would thoughtlessly ask if I was “all ready for Fashion Week,” and I’d suffer a great pang of dread and a downward spiral into a black hole. I knew it was irrational, but the void that fashion left felt bigger and bigger.

  * * *

  The year I turned thirty-nine I made a deal to come up with a series about my life for HBO, and I chose Marshall Brickman to collaborate on the script, someone I looked up to and was thrilled to get to know. It was a good script that never made it to series. In the process of working together Marshall and I became friendly for a time, and I started to value his opinion more and more, especially after he let slip a remark that haunted me for a long time and eventually acted as a kind of jog to my conscience. We were talking about the character of me that we were developing for the show; a heightened, more ridiculous version of me but me nonetheless. After living through Unzipped I was getting good at being objective, good at sending myself up without hating myself or feeling sold out. Marshall said something like “Well. Isaac is a little past his prime. I mean. Forty and still not with anyone. It’s abnormal.” He actually used the word “abnormal,” which jarred me at first, because even though he was talking about the character of Isaac, that fact was true about the person Isaac, too. I thought, Shit. There’s some unspoken rule about people who cross over into their forties alone and are too set in their ways to ever find true love. I have one more year till I’m officially abnormal. I called him on it, and he backpedaled and apologized, but I never got over it. Isaac the character and Isaac the person: doomed.

  Later that year, on an unusually beautiful spring day, June 21, 2001, I met my mother at her lawyer’s office to discuss selling her house, which was a big deal for her and also for my sisters and me, since this was the house we’d grown up in. It felt like I was turning a definitive corner. I dressed in a suit to impress the lawyers, and the meeting went way over, into the afternoon, which I hadn’t expected. I was very late to walk Harry, who had only been with me about eight months. I swooped in, gave him a treat for not messing in the apartment, and flew out the door again, Harry on his leash, me still dressed in the suit and tie. As soon as I got to Twelfth Street and Fifth Avenue I noticed an incredibly attractive man way across the street, walking in the opposite direction down Fifth Avenue. We made eye contact, but we passed each other without either of us crossing the street and taking the initiative. As I’ve mentioned, it was a time in my life when the most innocent of walks around the block might lead to some sort of impromptu sex. This mode of operations was justified by Maria Napoli, who told me not to be afraid of these encounters, that they might lead somewhere interesting. But this gorgeous man and I crossed paths, made eye contact, and that was that. Oh well, I thought. Another Jewish affair. And I continued on.

  As I was getting close to Sixth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, the handsome stranger came running up behind me. I intuited his advance and turned, watching him approach, his gorgeous looks coming into focus: Six-foot-one, curly dark brown hair, and eyes like black dots on a smiley face. High, Native American-looking cheekbones, chipmunkish cheeks, and a cleft chin that makes him a kind of Puerto Rican Cary Grant. He looked at me with such interest, taking such care to notice, it actually made me feel like I was the attractive one, a reversal of logic. He was dressed in a long-sleeved crewneck T-shirt, baggy, wide-legged khaki pants, and flip-flops. He came right out and said, “You’re that designer, right?”—which didn’t come across as coy manipulation; it was a way of dispensing with pretense. We walked the rest of the way home, and when we got to my door I said, “Well. Um. We should keep in touch or something. I’d love to get your phone number but I don’t have a pen.” This was before we had cell phones on us at all times. I said, “Why don’t you come upstairs for a second?” A rather standard-issue pickup line for such an auspicious occasion. Upstairs—well. I’m sure you can imagine the end of the episode better than I can tell it.

  Arnold and I had two or three formal dates after that first encounter, then all pretense fell away and we started seeing each other regularly, getting very close, very quickly. There was something entirely different about this courtship. Aside from the great physical attraction, we were very honest with each other at all times. All earnestness. No posing. He brought it out in me, and I in him. I guess that’s a description of the word “chemistry.” After the first month we had a fight, but it didn’t break us up; it brought us even closer. Then toward the end of that summer we were driving back from Bridgehampton on the Long Island Expressway with Harry in the backseat when traffic stopped dead. We were literally there for five or six hours at a complete standstill. Normally something like that would make me panicky, claustrophobic, but being with him that day felt fun, like a survivalist adventure.

  When we first met, Harry was protective of me and would growl when Arnold approached, sometimes even nip when he got too close to the bed. More than once he made Arnold bleed. But Arnold laughed about it, which made me laugh. It also made me like Arnold so much more. Very few people can make me laugh, but Arnold really can. Laughing that is close to seizure. We laugh at things that no one else would ever find funny or even get. The things we laugh at defy description, at least in writing. It’s like another language we speak. Not to say that we don’t have our bad moments, but for two such prospectively dark, moody people, we cast light on each other in the private world we occupy together.

&nbs
p; When we met Arnold had just moved back from LA and was looking for an apartment. We both thought it would work to live together temporarily. But the minute Arnold moved in, we knew it was a mistake. I felt my little haven was being invaded, and he could feel the unwelcome. It was a one-bedroom apartment—hard to share on any terms. The bathroom alone; I was horrified at the thought of someone moving their toiletries into my shower and medicine cabinet. And I’ve always been bossy in the kitchen. I like running it in what I think is the most efficient way, and anyone messing with that puts themselves in terrible jeopardy. Also: Sharing a bed is hard enough for people who don’t have sleep issues. For me it’s impossible. Nothing is worse than lying awake while someone next to you is fast asleep, breathing deeply, snoring, while you lie there seething. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world, enough to make you hate anyone. The problem was I’d lived alone since I moved out of my mother’s house nearly twenty years earlier, where I had my own bedroom from the age of eight. I was “abnormal.” Set in my ways.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was getting ready to leave for a meet-and-greet on an all-star production of The Women at the Roundabout Theatre, which I had signed on to as costume designer. It was a busy time for me. My TV show was about to premiere that week, and I was scheduled to leave for LA the next day to do a round of talk shows and appearances to promote it. I was rushing around the apartment getting ready that morning while Arnold took Harry out for his morning walk. Before long, Arnold returned, somewhat hysterical for someone usually so calm and collected. Before I understood what was going on, I thought something had happened to Harry. I turned on the TV, and then Arnold, Harry, and I stood on the terrace looking straight at the World Trade Center, watching firsthand as the horror unfolded before our eyes.