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34 The Costume Designer Summer 2019 rageous than the last, one almost forgets the pieces had to be made new for this production. The unforgettable Oscar gowns flit past, as well as four world tours. This is what mastery looks like. In addition to designing 465 costumes for the show, Mackie was surprised to find he was one of the three key men in Cher's life represented onstage. He admits, "It has never occurred to me that someone would be playing me. It is very odd." Early on, the actor cast was very loud and large. Cher dryly commented that she wouldn't still be working with him if he was like that. Michael Berresse took over the role and although the stage iteration is much campier than the real man, Mackie approves "because it's a show." When a flustered censor rails against his scanty silhouettes calling them a scandal, Mackie's stage persona has one of the best lines of the night. "No," he replies with a twinkle in his eye, "it's a brand." One can only imagine what Mackie as a child would have thought of the show. As a boy, he loved seeing films and drawing pictures. "When I was six years old, I liked Technicolor movies with music, dancing, and singing. The more colorful they were, the more I liked them," he explains. "I would make stage sets and little people up on my dresser drawers. It never occurred to me to do any- thing else." During his first film job illustrating for Costume Designer Frank Thompson on 1963's Love Is a Ball, he met Edith Head. "Edith would come in to see what I was doing. She said, 'Well, hello, I'm Edith Head,'—like I didn't know," Mackie chuckles. Shortly thereafter, he began working for Head at Paramount and other legendary designers from Hollywood's Golden Age. He refers to the time as his "won- derful young career." During his first venture into television, Mackie delighted in assisting Ray Aghayan on The Judy Garland Show. "It was a great show for me," he remarks, "because Judy was such a handful, Ray didn't have time to design the guest stars and chorus people, and that was fine with me." Also, variety tele- vision like old movies had production numbers and dancers. As a result, Mackie became acquainted with every choreog- rapher in Los Angeles and New York. Eventually, Aghayan agreed to share the design credit and Mackie became a full- fledged Costume Designer. They became partners both on and offscreen until Aghayan's passing in 2011. On The Carol Burnett Show, Mackie started garnering attention. Burnett became like family and he loved the way she allowed him to be a collaborator in the humor. "Comedy is a tricky thing. You have to surprise people," Mackie con- fides. Never is this more evident than in the unforgettable "curtain dress." Although after decades of discussing it, he shrugs, "We've all seen the movie Gone with the Wind. And our script just said that she made a dress out of the drapes, which we all have already seen. It took me a while, but I finally figured out what I thought would be funny and I guess it was one of the biggest laughs ever on television." Sonny and Cher were first season guests on The Carol Burnett Show, then they became stars in their own right. "I had America's lady next door in one studio, you walked through the men's room into the other studio, and there was The Sonny & Cher Show." Coincidentally, the two female leads were exactly the same size. In a landscape populated with buxom blondes, at first the network didn't know how to market Cher, but Mackie immediately recognized her potential. With her striking exoticism, he felt she could be almost any ethnicity and likened her to a 1930s femme fatale. When he started putting her in bias cut satin, the fan mail poured in. He says, "There was an offhand casualness about her wearing the most outrageous things like they were a T-shirt and jeans, and she would never pose." With up to 20 "When you see someone who has real glamour, it just makes you tingle."