Finally her black Lexus pulls up and stops at the curb in front, and I run out to meet the car. My mother’s tall, imposing driver, Robert, hops out of the front seat. He greets me, we shake hands. Then he opens the door and helps my mother out of the car. I feel guilty because he’s assuming the responsibilities of a son—driving her, adjusting her legs as she maneuvers in and out of the car, doing her grocery shopping, changing lightbulbs.
I walk beside her as she makes her way up the one big step into the restaurant and very slowly to the table, leaning on her cane the entire way. The maître d’, Frank, who knows the drill, calls for two cushions, which get whisked into place before she sits. She’s wearing a pink bouclé jacket and diamond-studded coral earrings shaped like turtles, vintage Kenneth Jay Lane. Also an old scarf of mine, a huge peony print on chiffon, an abstract blur of peachy color. I notice the shoes she has on. They’re Manolo Blahniks that he did for a collection of mine in the 1990s: black satin flat sling-backs with square rhinestone buckles. Mental note: Dressy flats are so relevant again and about to happen in a big way.
Even before her body hits the seat she starts off the conversation: “I watched you on QVC last night. Very nice.” She’s referring to one of my many weekly appearances on the air at QVC, a thriving, wonderful business, the most important of the few licenses I’ve maintained in the apparel business. “I bought a pair of shoes. I love those moccasins ’cause they’re gorgeous. And they’re so comfortable. Also I love that Shawnie Sue. She looks great in everything.” She refers to Shawn Killinger, an on-air host with whom I’ve developed a huge viewership, a great rapport, and a dear friendship. My mother finishes the thought with a sentence I hear at least once a week: “I love watching you on TV. It feels like we’ve visited!”
Immediately she brings up the book she’s reading by a novelist she’s just discovered, Richard Russo. “All these years, I never heard of him.” She’s incensed that I haven’t read the book, which she gave me the week before. “I know you’ll love it. He’s funny and smart and he won a Pulitzer.” Then I can sense the switch going off in her head. She’s turning from literary raconteuse to matriarch. From that point forward, either to show me once again that there’s no other meaning to life, or because it’s just the patter of a ninety-year-old lady, her conversation will not be budged from the subject of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. No matter what’s on my agenda to talk about, the subject of newborn babies prevails. She puts forth another story about one of her “delicious” great-grandchildren: “Nothing’s formed yet. No defenses. You know? They’re not people yet. Just pure, fat, happy babies.”
I interrupt her and bring up Kitty, our new dog. I know how concerned she was for me when I lost Harry and she seems genuinely happy for Arnold and me that we’re past the ordeal of letting him go. I always thought that in my mother’s mind it was better in so many ways for me to be the cliché of a gay man who was obsessed with my dogs than it would be for me to parent an actual baby. She was against my fathering a child those years before with Sandra. But here and now she surprises me.
She says, “Why haven’t you had a child?”
I shrug and look wide-eyed at Arnold.
“You’re not too old,” she goes on, “and Arnold definitely isn’t too old. He can do all the heavy lifting.”
It’s the first time she’s actually advocated for our having a child. Arnold and I had been over and over it and rejected the idea. I was always afraid of being too moody, too unstable, too dramatic, and I worried about exposing a child to that kind of life. I even went as far as to say, “Whoever that unborn kid was, she was spared.” But now that my mother’s brought it up, I start thinking maybe I’m less self-involved, more stable. Maybe I’m readier to think these thoughts. Is that because she suggested it? Is it because after all these years, even she thinks it might be a good idea?
I ask her why she brought up the subject.
“I don’t want you to regret anything. And I only want you to be happy.”
She starts talking about her great-grandchildren again. She’s expecting two more in the next few months, and her departure for Florida for the season is predicated upon these arrivals. The conversation gets very existential, as it does more and more these days. “I’m not even sure I’m going to wake up in the morning,” she says, fishing for an optimistic rejoinder. “But you know, I still have so much to look forward to.”
Rather than allow the conversation to be again dominated by the subject of great-grandchildren, I whip out my smartphone. It’s something she does not have—else there’d be nothing but pictures of pure, fat, happy babies all night. I show her a picture of Kitty. I say, “Here’s a picture of your newest granddaughter.” A long pause, and then with a squint, she says:
“She has my eyes!”
32
I get to the Carlyle sometime around four thirty in the afternoon and make my way to the room provided for me on the eighteenth floor, a room that hasn’t been redecorated since the early 1980s and feels more luxurious and chic for it: muted floral chintz curtains that match the quilted bedspread and tufted headboard, shellacked colonial revival desk and shiny brass table lamp with ruched lampshade, a padded, lead-weighted leather binder with Room Service Guide embossed in gold serif type. This is the room that Eartha Kitt and Elaine Stritch used for the same purpose. And Bobby Short. Waiting there for me are two little sandwiches and a chocolate Pavlova cookie from Sant Ambroeus, left there by my associate, who preceded me there to check out a few last-minute details, a few last-minute reservations she’s trying to accommodate.
For the next four hours I stay in that room and alternate between cursing my fate, wondering how I could have agreed to something as crazy as this, and blessing my lucky stars. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event (which will hopefully recur a number of times over the course of my life). I’m playing the Café Carlyle for two weeks. Ten shows. Ten opportunities to sing songs, tell stories, bare my soul onstage, in front of very distinguished, hypercritical audiences full of strangers and, even scarier, friends.
I warm up my voice. Up and down scales. I warm up my facial muscles, “chewing gum” and rotating my tongue the way they taught me in Performing Arts high school. I do my “circles” rolling my neck, then my hips, my feet, etc., like we learned in Luigi’s class. I assume downward-facing dog and warrior poses to stretch my groin and hamstrings. I retreat to the bed, covering my head with the hotel comforter in mortal fear. Then under the covers I practice punch lines softly to myself, eyebrows undulating, face twitching in expectation of landing the joke. Then I rationalize: Tonight, again, no matter what, the secret of my fraudulence will be kept safe from the world, and I will prevail.
I dress. My diamond ankle bracelet first. (An Ayurvedic psychic told me I should wear diamonds “starting on a Thursday.”) Then I put on my tuxedo and wrap a white silk scarf around my neck, a cross between a nineteenth-century stock tie and something you might see on Tom Jones circa 1968. My black patent Belgian loafers are slipped on, and I’m ready. I proceed to the living room where Shanleigh Philip, my associate in charge of development, is seated on the couch opposite Gypsy, which plays on TCM. She’s engrossed in a text and doesn’t look up when I enter.
“All ready?” she asks after sending the text. I don’t answer. Which is my answer.
After I spend about ten tense minutes standing in the living room so as not to wrinkle or smudge anything, the call comes from Darwin, the stage manager, saying the house is seated and they’re ready to start. I know that already Ben Waltzer, the musical director, and the band have assembled onstage and done their scales and warm-ups. I picture the new trumpet player, Benny Benack, decked out in his black suit and orange-striped socks, which I got a glimpse of earlier. I convince myself that I can make it across the hallway. No trace of my usual claustrophobia on the trip downstairs in the tiny elevator—for the time being it’s edged out to make space for the massive stage fright that has crowded in. On the main floor I tra
verse the lobby and up a few stairs to the holding spot outside the “stage entrance” to the cabaret, where I await Darwin’s cue. I peek in, which somehow stabilizes my nerves. The hallowed room. The pink lights from the table lamps and the dim ambers on the cool jades and tangerines of the Marcel Vertès murals. The ancient Greek minstrels, the cherubs, the donkeys, and pussycats staring into the audience. The old waiters from central casting. It could be any time. Eternal. Anything could be happening outside on the street, but the stage light washes away everything harsh: politics, news, reduced through a squint, declawed, leaving only humor. People drinking, laughing, happy. And I want to be one of them. I hear my intro music and I roll my neck. I’m clutching at the black curtain and kicking my feet in exhilaration. Then. I compose myself. If I reveal too much too soon, it’ll be over before it starts.
The door opens and now I can see the entire room. The boys playing onstage. Benny is there in his striped socks, already in the set. All I have to do is traverse that small path from the door to the stage. Once I get on there’s no more fear or dread. I can be on that stage, I must be on that stage. The first entrance, acting like, pretending, you’re not nervous. Then life imitates art, and I’m not nervous anymore, and I’m able to do it. I’m able to hear tones and remember lyrics and punch lines. No more superstitions. Nothing in the way. At this moment, this seventy-minute moment, everything stops. It’s not about objects, or clothes, or obligations, or any other ideas the world will have you believe it’s about. It’s not about achievement, or money, or position, or power. In fact it’s the opposite of what success is supposed to feel like.
Of all the satisfying creative experiences of my life, the next seventy minutes are the reward for what’s come before. I spent the last three years working on my museum retrospective with amazing curators, fabulous architects, and filmmakers who helped put it together. It represented my creative life: fashion, film, show business, publishing—all aspects. And for all that, for all that evidence of my illustrious past, this is what I’m left with, this is my future. For all the speculation about who I am, what I do, this is the real answer. Just me and the audience and time at a standstill.
After the first number I settle into the set. Now there’s no possibility of failure. I wind my way through eight tunes and five monologues. Time has still not started ticking normally yet. It’s an eternal evening with them and me. Then the finale. The last song of the night. It’s not a big finger-snapping, toe-tapping, leave-them-with-a-feel-good number. I made the decision not to pander, not to be in their face and demand smiles. I risk ending the show on an almost-somber note. The song is also not an abstraction. It says what it means. Not corny, not ironic. Just the shortest distance between me and the audience. It’s a tiny song that stayed with me from my hundreds of Liza records. A wending tune written by John Kander, with a very sane, very meaningful lyric by Fred Ebb. The lights in the room come down. I’m in the spotlight. I’m not fat. I’m not selling anything. I’m the minstrel singer that was predicted in the Mexican tarot. The song is the most important thing at that moment. A little truth telling.
I realize more while I’m singing. Not only the idea of the song, I realize the rightness of my being there, right there, communicating these words. My other self is able to fly up into the corner of the room and observe. This is the moment in the evening I’ve been waiting for. When I see myself the way a camera does, the nonperfect version, the real me. I’m telling the whole truth and I’ve got them in my hands. Complete silence. Ben pauses at the piano, he’s waiting for me. And then I sing:
“Happiness comes in on tip-toe.
Well, whaddya know.
It’s a quiet thing.
A very quiet thing.”
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank David Kuhn, whose idea this was in the first place. Also Peternelle van Arsdale, for her constant and beautiful editorial eye. Thanks, too, to Shanleigh Ciena for her diligence in seeing this through to the end.
A special thanks to my dear cousin Arlene Maidman, who convinced me that my story came across okay, having reread the manuscript a number of times. And thanks to Caroline Weber, who convinced me the book would be okay, not having read a word.
Special thanks to Amy Einhorn for her intuition and precision.
More than anyone, thanks to my husband, Arnold Germer. He read every word of this book several times and listened to me talking about it at all hours of the day and night. Without him, the story might’ve had a much less happy ending.
About the Author
Isaac Mizrahi (Libra) performs cabaret across the country, has written two books, hosted his own television talk show, and made countless appearances in movies and television. He has directed and designed many productions for the stage and screen. He founded his design company in 1987, was the star and cocreator of the documentary Unzipped, and was the subject of a large-scale, mid-career survey at the Jewish Museum in New York City. He currently develops projects in television, theatre, and literature through his own production company, Isaac Mizrahi Entertainment. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
The names and identifying characteristics of some persons described in this book have been changed, as have dates, places, and other details of events depicted in the book.
I.M. Copyright © 2019 by Isaac Mizrahi. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce from the following:
Flora, the Red Menace excerpt courtesy of John Kander, Fred Ebb, David Thompson. Based on the novel Love Is Just Around the Corner by Lester Atwell. Originally adapted by George Abbott. Copyright © 1965, 1988 by Alley Music Corp. and Trio Music Co., Inc.
Cover design by Keith Hayes
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINT EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Names: Mizrahi, Isaac, author.
Title: I.M.: a memoir / Isaac Mizrahi.
Other titles: IM, a memoir
Description: First edition.|New York, N.Y.: Flatiron Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029257|ISBN 9781250074089 (hardcover)|ISBN 9781250077813 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mizrahi, Isaac.|Fashion designers—United States—Biography.|Actors—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC TT505.M595 A3 2019|DDC 746.9/2092 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029257
eISBN 9781250077813
Our e
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First Edition: February 2019
I.M. Page 37