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Fashion victim | page 1, 2
By 1972, Newsweek was calling Halston "the best designer in America." His name was everywhere -- New Yorker cartoons, gossip columns, top-10 songs. He was everybody's permissive and forgiving best friend -- bingeing on sliders at White Castle with Liz, bingeing on scotch and coke on Fire Island with Liza. He became enamored of a bizarre, unintelligible and maniacal Colombian window dresser named Victor Hugo, who liked to give window mannequins submachine guns and have them act out "the Patty Hearst bank robbery scene." Through Hugo (so called for his physical endowments, his literary ones being undoubtedly few), Halston soon met and befriended his perfect art-world counterpart, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Halston was now one of the most internationally recognized figures in the world. It was inevitable that they would become friends. In 1973 -- "the year of Halston" -- Halston Inc. was acquired by Norton Simon Industries (a company in the business of buying brand names) for $12 million in stock and a yearly salary for Halston of $150,000, escalating to $500,000. It was an unprecedented deal for a designer, and the potentially negative implications of selling a company built around his own name, image and creativity were not immediately apparent to anyone. Halston believed that for a company to acquire -- or even desire -- his name without his talent would be senseless. Why would anyone even want to put the Halston name on something that he himself had not created or at least supervised? Other designers, such as the ubiquitous Pierre Cardin, were splashing their names across anything with a surface, from cigarette lighters to cars, but Halston refused to have his name on anything that had not bubbled up from the wellspring of his own creativity. A case in point was the creation and launch of his signature perfume, "Halston," which would go on to be the second- By the time the fragrance launched -- and became an instant, runaway hit beyond anyone's wildest expectations -- Halston the superstar had almost completely replaced the sweet Midwestern boy who had come to New York and made good. His constant drug use prompted him to start wearing dark glasses at all times -- even indoors at night. He held his cigarettes vertically aloft, and always traveled with an entourage of models in matching outfits known as "the Halstonettes," who followed him like ducklings trailing their mother. Studio 54 had become his home away from home, and Steve Rubell and Bianca Jagger his new best friends. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, the suits were getting restless. Pressured into entering into dozens of licensing agreements with the manufacturers of such sundry items as sheets, gloves and luggage, Halston, never one to delegate authority or share credit, found it increasingly difficult to fulfill his contractual obligations. Aside from perfume sales, his business, though glamorous, was not very profitable. When NSI asked him to sign a deal with downscale J.C. Penney, in which he would essentially become its in-house name designer, Halston surprised his bosses by cheerfully agreeing, with much lip service to his lower-middle-class, Midwestern roots. The backlash was instant. Bergdorf's dropped Halston's collection, and many of his formerly faithful friends and clients began defecting to other designers' camps. In 1983, the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts orchestrated a leveraged buyout of NSI. Esmark Inc., a company with holdings as diverse as a chemical and fertilizer company and a bra and girdle company -- as well as $6.3 billion in annual sales -- bought NSI. Max Factor was spun off from Halston, making the design house even less profitable than before. Within a year, Esmark was bought by the megaconglomerate Beatrice Foods, a behemoth with $9.3 billion in annual sales. Rapidly becoming a smaller and smaller fish in an ever-growing pond, Halston didn't even meet his last boss -- the CEO of the company that owned his name -- before getting locked out of his offices after throwing one too many coke-fueled hissy fits. He died in 1990, of AIDS-related causes, still trying to buy back his name. Toward the end of "Simply Halston," Gaines describes an anecdote Esmark's CEO related to a group of Chicago stockbrokers after what had been, to him, a baffling encounter with the famous designer. "He kept calling me 'Mr. Kelly,'" the businessman recalled, "but I didn't know what his real name was. What do you call him? Mr. Halston?" As for the absurdly grand office and the impossibly regal manner of a man whose influence was fading by the minute: "All I've got to say is that it was a very impressive office for a small amount of profit. It's a long run for a short slide." What makes Halston's rise and demise poignant is that it played itself out on the cusp of modern celebrity. What began as a classic Hollywood "boy from the boondocks hits the big time" rags-to-riches story ended like a scene out of "Wall Street." Halston became a celebrity when celebrity required a certain degree of accomplishment and distinction. He was never able to understand how his name could be successfully disassociated from his work and turned into the brand to which he would become a slave.
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