Bob Mackie, designer who bedazzled Carol Burnett and Cher, dies at 87

Bob Mackie – the exuberant costume and fashion designer whose glittering, beaded, sequinned, rhinestoned, feathered and often winged creations bedecked, bedazzled and elevated performers like Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Bernadette Peters, Bette Midler, Mitzi Gaynor, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, RuPaul and, most memorably and enduringly, Cher – died on Sept 14 in Palm Springs, California. He was 87.

The death, at a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said Joe McFate, Mackie’s long-time design director.

“He dressed every spangly woman in show business,” said Frank DeCaro, author of Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion And Fantasy Of Bob Mackie (1999). “You can mention some of the greatest names in fashion, and the average person won’t be able to conjure up, for example, a Giorgio Armani suit. But if you say to an American of a certain age, ‘What is a Bob Mackie?’, they know exactly what you’re talking about.”

Mackie got his start in Hollywood, dropping out of college to sketch for costume designers Jean Louis and Edith Head, but it was television that made his name.

When Burnett put together her variety show in 1967, she picked Mackie to design the outfits. Over the show’s 11 seasons, he created about 60 costumes a week.

Sonny Bono and Cher had veered from their folk roots and were playing Las Vegas when CBS hired them to do a weekly show. Mackie had seen photos of them, and as he told Vogue, which put together an oral history of the designer in 2019, “they were kind of like New Age cave people. There they were in their fur vests, funny pants, belts and just a whole look that nobody had had up until that time”.

The producers did not know what to do with Cher, but Mackie did. Their collaboration, first on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1971 to 1974), delighted TV audiences and confounded the network’s censors, as Mackie bared more and more of Cher’s extraordinary physique in ever more outlandish get-ups.

Mackie recalled a censor complaining of one outfit that revealed the undersides of Cher’s breasts (the industry term was “underboob”). “Well, if we stand her on her head,” he retorted, “it will just be cleavage.”

Reviewing Cher, her post-divorce variety show that ran for 11 months from 1975 to 1976, Newsweek declared that the performer “played second banana to the show’s real star – a cool, hip, certifiably freaky costume designer named Bob Mackie. Television hasn’t shown so much glitter and flash since NBC did a special on Liberace’s closet”.

Robert Gordon Mackie was born in Monterey Park, California, a bit east of downtown Los Angeles, on March 24, 1939. That was the year, he liked to say, that Gone With The Wind, The Women and The Wizard Of Oz came out.

His father, Charles Robert Mackie, who worked at Bank of America, and his mother, Mildred Agnes (Smith) Mackie, a homemaker, divorced when he was young. He was raised by his paternal grandmother, Bessie Ida Mackie, in Alhambra, California.

Bob Mackie attended Pasadena City College and then the Chouinard Art Institute, now part of the California Institute of the Arts, before dropping out to work on movies, first with Fred Thompson, then Louis and Head. (Mackie sketched the skintight gown that Louis made for Marilyn Monroe when she sang Happy Birthday to US President John F. Kennedy in 1962.)

In 1963, he was hired by Ray Aghayan, an Iran-born designer who was working on Judy Garland’s television variety show. The two became business and romantic partners, sharing the first Emmy awarded for costume design, in 1967, for their work on Alice Through The Looking Glass, an eye-popping confection of a television movie.

The pair received Oscar nominations for Lady Sings The Blues, the 1972 biopic of Billie Holiday starring Ross, and for Funny Lady, the 1975 sequel to Funny Girl. Mackie was nominated on his own for Pennies From Heaven, the 1981 film musical starring Steve Martin and Peters.

Mackie won an Emmy in 1999 for Cher’s costumes in Cher: Live In Concert From Los Angeles and again in 2003, for Cher: The Farewell Tour.

A brief marriage to Marianne Nicholson, an actress whose stage name is Lulu Porter, ended in divorce in the early 1960s. Their son, Robert Gordon Mackie Jr, who was known as Robin and worked as a make-up artist, died of AIDS in 1993. Aghayan died in 2011. Mackie is survived by family members that include a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters. NYTIMES