by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I had originally planned to watch the Lifetime
movies, but their titles, Deadly Influencer
and Nightmare Tenant, just
promised so much of the same-old same-old that I decided instead to watch a CNN
presentation (apparently of one of their documentaries that’s actually seen theatrical
release) I’d seen promoted on the network all week: Halston, a bio-doc about the legendary fashion designer who,
at least according to the legend, first put American fashion on the map and
made a U.S. fashion house the rival of the great (and incredibly snobby) ones
from France. I was familiar with the broad outlines of Halston’s story from an
Arts & Entertainment Biography
show I saw about him years ago: he was born Roy Halston Frowick, Jr. in Des
Moines, Iowa in 1932, in the middle of the Depression — though his family moved
around a lot and, while they didn’t leave the Midwest, he never felt rooted to
Iowa or any other Midwestern state as his home. We get that piece of
biographical background only towards the very end of the show, from his cousin
Lesley Frowick (who worked for him in the later years), and there’s nothing
about his early years as a milliner (fashion-speak for a hatmaker) in Chicago
in the late 1950’s. The show begins Halston’s story in 1961, when he was living
in New York City as an in-house hatmaker for the famous Bergdorf Goodman
high-end fashion shop, when he became an overnight sensation by designing the
white, helmet-shaped “pillbox” hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband
John’s inauguration as the 35th President of the United States.
Bergdorf got a lot of orders for Jackie Kennedy’s hat, and imitators cranked
out copies of it — and since the original had got dented on the top during the
inauguration ceremonies, the knock-off people designed their versions with the
dent built in. In 1968 — a year represented by a montage of various city scenes
and Aretha Franklin’s great soul record “The House That Jack Built” on the
soundtrack — Halston left Bergdorf’s and set up his own salon where he would
design and make entire outfits for women, not just hats. He was, not
surprisingly, Gay — he comes off in the documentary footage of him as the sort
of person who isn’t ashamed of his own queeniness and (like Liberace, Truman
Capote and Halston’s good friend Andy Warhol) decided to ramp up the camp in
his personal image so people would think, “He acts too much like one to really be one.”
The maker of CNN’s Halston documentary, Frédéric Tcheng (whose multicultural
name makes me curious about what he
looks like), includes a clip from the infamous 1967 CBS documentary The
Homosexual in which the announcer said that
a film clip they showed, made with secret cameras, of Gay men cavorting on New
York’s Fire Island in the summer would be run in negative film to avoid
compromising the identities of anyone in the footage — and then, this being a very different age with a different attitude towards
Queer folk (or, as we are now designated in the mainstream media in one of
those hideous neologisms that have arisen from a demented search for political
correctness, “LGBTQ+ people”), Tcheng reverses the image back to positive film
as he describes Fire Island as a summer playground, in more ways than one, for
Gay men with professional jobs in New York City. I have virtually no interest
in the world of fashion — I accept that we have to wear clothes for legal and
customary reasons but I’m not all that obsessed with what they look like, and
my husband Charles and I often joke that if there’s a “Gay gene” we didn’t get
the fashion alleles — but Halston’s story turned out to be unexpectedly
interesting not only for the part A&E told in their “Biography” series
(hotshot young designer achieves huge success, uses his money to start
hard-partying at Studio 54, doing a lot of guys and a lot of drugs, until he gets
AIDS and dies at the relatively young age of 57) but for Halston’s peculiar
relationship to corporate capitalism and the depressing fact that the corporados
always win in the end no matter how well we
think we’ve either resisted them or found a niche in their wall of greed and
exploitation.
Halston’s downfall at the hands of corporate capitalism really
began in 1977, when he sold his private dressmaking and fashion company to
Norton Simon, Inc., one of the “conglomerates” that arose as a business model
in the 1960’s and really took off in the 1970’s. The conglomerate was based on
the priniciple of “scientific management,” which basically held that the
principles of running any sort of
business were the same, so a company that had built itself on one line — selling
insurance, running parking lots, selling parts for model cars or whatever could
run a movie studio or a fashion house equally well. Norton Simon, Inc.’s point
person to administer Halston the company and deal with Halston the person was
David Mahoney, who for six years pretty much gave him free rein to organize
expensive promotional trips to places like France (where Halston and four other
U.S. designers had a head-to-head competition with five French designers in the
palace at Versailles and, like in the 1930’s movie Gold Diggers in
Paris, American anarchism and verve won out
over French provincialism) and China. Then in 1983 Mahoney offered to buy the
entire company and take it private (a bit of corporate Newspeak that means
buying out all your shareholders and keeping the company to yourself and your
friends and private investors — capitalism has gone crazy enough that a company
like Firestone that was publicly traded for years can “go private,” then start
selling its stock again and call it an “initial public offering,” or IPO, even
though Firestone stock was
publicly traded years before) — only his low-ball offer attracted bigger offers
from other corporate suitors.
Norton Simon, Inc. was taken over by Esmark, a
conglomerate whose only connection to anything women wore was the Playtex bra — and Halston was
dragged along into the world of bottom-line capitalism and forced to account
for the big expensive trips he had used to promote both the Halston brand and
Halston personally as a public figure and celebrity. Just before the Esmark
takeover Halston the person had made what turned out to be a huge mistake: he
had cut a deal with J. C. Penney to design clothes for them under a new line
called “Halston III” on the not unreasonable attitude that people who couldn’t
afford his designer creations might still want to look nice in clothes with his
name on them. (The “Halston III” name came about because Halston the person
figured that his millinery business at Bergdorf’s was Halston I, his haute
couture business Halston II, and making
clothes for the mass market was Halston III.) The show at which he introduced
his designs for Penney’s was savaged in Women’s Wear Daily and throughout the fashion industry. Bergdorf
Goodman’s discontinued selling Halston’s products (including the
teardrop-shaped perfume bottle that had become iconic — and much imitated —
even though it was difficult to fill and new industrial processes had to be
invented to get the perfume into the bottle) and the rest of the fashion world
declared him a pariah and threw him out just when he needed their support in
his ongoing battle with his new corporate overlords. (Halston himself joked
about the Esmark takeover that “aliens from Planet Tampon have landed on Planet
Halston.”) Halston the person responded to the takeover of Halston the
corporate name by coming into work late, missing deadlines and ramping up the prima
donna behavior that had already intimidated
a lot of the people who used to work for him and were his friends — and in 1984
Esmark capped Halston’s humiliation by firing him from the company that bore
his name and changing the locks so he physically couldn’t get into the
building.
According to the Wikipedia page on Halston, they eventually unloaded
the business and it ended up as part of Revlon — which as a famous cosmetics
firm at least knew something
about women’s fashions — and though the CNN documentary depicts Halston as
pretty much aimlessly wandering and living off his accumulated fortunes in the
last six years of his life, in fact he desperately negotiated with Revlon to
try to get back into the company whose brand he had built. In 1988 Halston
tested “HIV-positive” and, despite the protests of his friends and family that
this was no longer a death sentence, he pretty much treated it as one and moved
to San Francisco to live out the last two years of his life — though the actual
diagnosis when he died was Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin cancer linked to the use of
amyl nitrite “poppers” by Gay men to facilitate anal-receptive sex. (The film
acknowledges that Halston was Gay but only briefly touches on his private life
— he had an on-again, off-again 15-year relationship with someone named Victor
Hugo, really, who was a South
American and in the two-shots of them certainly looks like the butch one in the relationship; he worked
for Halston designing show windows and was apparently very good at it, but even
after they reconciled themselves to his being Gay Halston’s relatives never
liked Hugo and urged Halston to break up with him, which he ultimately did.)
The aspects of Halston’s life dealing with the fashion industry interested me
little, but the story of how he got screwed over and spat out by the capitalist
system in general interested me quite a bit and gave what might otherwise have
been just another cautionary Behind the Music tale a quite impactful “spin” that tallied with my
overall politics in general and hatred of capitalism (especially modern-day
corporate capitalism) in particular.
