Miley Cyrus blew the audience away at the 66th annual Grammy Awards … not an easy thing to do in a vast room full of musical heavyweights. It wasn’t just her rendition of “Flowers;” it was also a daring, midriff-baring, beaded evening dress that raised eyebrows and a certain level of envy for nearly every woman in attendance.
The dress was from Bob Mackie’s 2002 runway collection, called “To Broadway with Love” – a collection of unique, signature Mackie creations inspired by Broadway musicals. This sheer and shimmery number was an ode to the musical “Sweet Charity.” Cyrus, a longtime Mackie fan, previously borrowed Mackie creations and asked if she could borrow a special gown for the Grammy Awards. Mackie was delighted to accommodate her. “Every time I’ve ever seen her in anything that I’ve [designed], I’ve adored it, because she loves to perform and get dressed up; you know that she’s loving every minute of it,” Mackie told Vogue.
There’s no doubt that Mackie loved every minute of the nearly 65 years he’s spent creating some of the most memorable costumes to grace stages, the big screen, and the small screen. That love of his art – and the considerable craft that goes into every vision’s realization – is explored in “Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion,” an intimate documentary by Matthew Miele that premiered last May at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. The film will be screened at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, as well.
Though Mackie is at the center of the film, which reflects on his life and art, the supporting cast of those who know him and have worked him includes Cher, Cyrus, Carol Burnett, P!nk, Tom Ford, Zac Posen, RuPaul, Mitzi Gaynor, and Vicki Lawrence. No doubt, these folks were all that Miele could fit in his film. But, those who have received the Mackie treatment over the decades also include Elton John, Carrol Channing, Farrah Fawcett, Ann-Magret, Dolly Parton, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Midler, Marlene Dietrich, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Donna Summer, and Oprah Winfrey … the list is inexhaustible.
Mackie has been nominated for three Academy Awards and 33 Emmys; he won nine of the latter. (It’s widely acknowledged as one of the worst travesties in Oscar history that he did not win in 1982 for the Steve Martin musical “Pennies from Heaven.” He lost to “Chariots of Fire;” its costuming is basically a bunch of Brits running about in baggy underwear.) In fact, there was no Emmy Award for costumes before Mackie. He worked on a television special in 1966 called “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” He and his longtime business and personal partner, the late Ray Aghayan, discovered that there was no category for best costume. So, they created one and won it.
Mackie was honored in 1999 by the Costume Designers Guild Awards. He won a Tony Award for Best Costume Design in a Musical for “The Cher Show” in 2019. Mackie, who was 80 at the time, referenced Ruth Gordon’s speech (she won her fist Tony at age 72 for “Rosemary’s Baby”) when he thanked the audience. “This is very encouraging for an 80-year-old,” he said.
Even though Mackie was born and raised in Southern California (in Monterey Park, Inglewood, and Alhambra), he says the dream of designing on Broadway seemed unattainable when he was a boy. “Even though I lived in Inglewood (just a few miles from Hollywood), I might as well have been living in Kansas,” he says, describing how he once horrified a room of his adult relatives when an uncle asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I want to design costumes on Broadway,” he exclaimed. He admired his peers whose obsessions didn’t run much further than baseball. “I loved Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable and Fred Astaire and all those [films] because they were in technicolor and they were full of costumes and scenery,” he says.
After high school and a quick stop at Pasadena City College, Mackie enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute – the premiere commercial art school in Los Angeles. (It was later absorbed into CalArts.) The school was nearly bursting with young talent in the early 1960s. Notable artists who would go on to have impressive careers include Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Noah Purifoy, Robert Irwin, and John Baldessari. Mackie attended night classes in costume design, so he didn’t have much time to mingle with his fellow alums. But, he recalls being seated behind a young artist named Don Bachardy, filled with awe. Still, he allowed himself only two years at Chouinard. “I had to get to work,” he says.
Luckily, Mackie possessed a skill that he found few designers in Hollywood had the patience or desire to master: sketching. Perhaps because he spent most of his childhood in his bedroom sketching or because he applied himself to his craft with diligence – morning, noon, and night – the young man barely out of his teens found himself employed as a sketch artist by several Hollywood costumers, including the legendary Edith Head. “She was in there every day looking at what I’d done that day,” he says. “Finally, one day, she says, ‘Do you know how to design strippers?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can probably do that.’ I worked on that film … it was Paul Newman and there was a bunch of strippers in Paris or something. In any event, she put me on the payroll. And when she wasn’t busy, I would run over and work with Jean Louis on a Marilyn Monroe film that was never finished.”
During Mackie’s time with Louis, a dress came out of the studio that Monroe wore when she famously sang “Happy Birthday” to then-President John F. Kennedy. It was a “naked” dress – an illusion that often characterized creations Mackie made for Mitzi Gaynor and, later, Cher. The Monroe dress has often been attributed to Mackie; it’s an urban myth that he chuckles off. “I never designed that dress,” he says. “People keep saying I designed it. When you say you did the sketch for a costume, they just automatically assume you designed it. Well, it doesn’t work that way. There are costume designers who don’t draw that well or don’t want to work too hard. And that was the job that I had for a couple [of] years before I started designing stuff on my own.”
Mackie does acknowledge that those early “nude” dresses were a strong influence. “When I was a young kid … Marlene Dietrich did her first acts in Vegas … and Jean Louis designed these dresses that were just as nude and just as see-through and luminous,” he says. “I’d always watched closely to see what he would do, but we didn’t do clothes like that. We were doing Doris Day movies, and she never wore a dress like that. I knew it existed and I said, ‘One day, I’ll do that for somebody who can really wear it.’”
Mackie got his big break as an independent designer in 1966 when he was hired to produce costumes for Gaynor’s Las Vegas show. The “nude” look, the sequins and beads, and the whole bedazzling display was a huge hit. He won two Emmy Awards years later for his costumes for two Gaynor television specials, in 1976 and 1977. In fact, Las Vegas would turn out to be a natural venue for Mackie’s theatrical visions with two huge, long-running shows – “Hallelujah Hollywood” (1974 to 1980) and “Jubilee!” (1981 to 2016).
Mackie’s success with Gaynor led him to the fledgling “The Carol Burnett Show.” Burnett describes in the documentary this impossibly young guy who turned up to audition for the role of costume designer. She was so taken with his ideas that she hired him immediately. It was a propitious hire for both of them. “The Carol Burnett Show” would run for 11 years. Nearly every big name in show business – on television, the big screen, or Broadway – appeared on the show at one time or another.
Mackie worked nonstop. “You work all weekend designing the damn thing so you can get it going Monday morning,” he recalls. “I used to do even the wig sketches.” It’s estimated that because Mackie designed not only the main characters’ costumes but also those for the dancers and extras, he produced over 17,000 sketches over the course of the show. “I was good at that,” he says. “That was my strongest thing I did, and that made my designing for characters and funny characters even stronger. And that’s what Carol loved.”
There were, of course, innumerable sketches that stood out in the show … but only one that now resides in the Smithsonian museum. It was a parody of the movie “Gone with the Wind.” The sketch, titled “Went with the Wind,” features Burnett utilizing a curtain (complete with a curtain rod) as an evening gown. “I was trying to think, ‘Well, we can’t do the same thing that they did in the movie,’” Mackie says. “It took me until the night before we taped to come up with an idea. I called Scenic and I said, ‘Can you get me some of the drapes that you’re using on the set? I have an idea that I think will work.’ And then I called Carol and she stopped by on her way home from rehearsal. I showed it to her and she started to laugh and she said, ‘This is going to be good.’”
Another bit of kismet happened to Mackie while working with Burnett – his introduction to a little-known duo called Sonny and Cher. The pair was brought in by network executives who were trying to find the right combination of featured performers who could bring in the youth audience, according to Mackie. The executives were so impressed by the act that they flew out to Las Vegas, where Sonny and Cher were performing. They were hired to produce a summer replacement show and later were given a permanent slot for “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” (1971 to 1974 and 1976 to 1977). Their costume designer was the ubiquitous Mackie.
In “Cher: The Memoir,” the performer opines that the majority of the audience who tuned in each week for the show did so partly for the comedy and guest stars … but mostly out of intense curiosity and to see what outrageous and provocative costumes she’d wear. “Cher came along, who had this amazing figure and [was a] wonderful looking girl, who didn’t look like anyone else in Hollywood,” Mackie says. “She was completely unique. She could do it all. She had that fabulous, glorious pin-up figure of her own. It was so much fun [to design for Cher]. I liked her so much and she was so much fun to work with. The girl loves to get dressed up.” Cher’s meteoric rise also paralleled (and helped propel) Mackie’s own career. Though he’d been a well-respected costume designer for over a decade in Hollywood, the sensation caused by Cher’s outfits on her show meant that Mackie was soon fielding offers for other shows, TV specials, and Las Vegas shows.
The end of the reprise of “The Sonny and Cher Show” in 1977 meant that Mackie was no longer enthralling America each week with his designs for Cher. So, he moved on to other stars such as Whitney Houston. Cher, however, remained his chief muse. She expanded her portfolio with some solid acting credits in the 1980s such as “Silkwood,” “Mask,” and “Moonstruck.” Cher was crushed when she did not receive an Oscar nomination for “Mask,” according to Mackie. It’s assumed that the role was too gritty and blue-collar for Hollywood sensitivities. (She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in “Moonstruck” in 1988.) “She says, ‘I should have been nominated for that film (“Mask”), but maybe the subject matter was a little tough,’” Mackie says. “‘So, they want me to give an award to some guy [Don Ameche, who won the Best Supporting Actor award for “Cocoon”].’ And I said, ‘Fine, what do you want to wear?’ [She said], ‘I want to dress up like I used to on the show. They haven’t seen me look like that for a long time.’”
The result was an appearance by Cher at the 1986 Academy Awards that made the front pages of newspapers all over the world. No one much remembers which actors or films won awards that night, but almost everyone remembers Cher coming out on stage looking like a Goth punk Native American from Planet X. “I sat down and started drawing,” Mackie says. “[Cher said,] ‘I want it to look like Indian costumes with feathers and a mohawk.’ I just thought, ‘The girl’s smart. If anyone can get the picture in the paper the next morning, it’s her.’ And they’re still printing that picture every year.”
The Cher-Mackie relationship has grown since then. He’s done tours for her and perhaps made his ultimate statement when her Broadway show garnered him a Tony Award. And despite tongue-in-cheek monikers such as the Sultan of Sequins and the Baron of Beads, Mackie’s creations from last week, last year, 10 years ago, or 30 years ago continue to feel fresh and fun and never fail to delight. Witness the 2024 Grammy Awards. “Flowers” belongs to Miley Cyrus, but that writhing, gyrating, bead-clad body belonged to Mackie.
Despite every accolade imaginable and homage paid to him by designers such as Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen, Mackie was never tempted to turn his sketch pen to fashion. “A fashion designer is designing for whoever walks into a store and likes what they see and puts it on and it looks good and it fits,” Mackie says. “A costume designer can really bring a reality to an actor. You can tell by the way they’re dressed where they’re coming from and what their preferences are in life. It’s interesting. Every so often, Carol Burnet would say to me, ‘I wasn’t sure how I was going to play this until you dressed me.’”
