Bernadette Peters and Bob Mackie's Relationship

It is worth digressing for a moment to underline the long history of Peters and Mackie’s working relationship. They first met at Elizabeth Courtney, an atelier named after the legendary dressmaker who was a partner in a costume design firm with Mackie and Ray Aghayan.[1] It was 1969 and Peters was there being fitted for a costume for The Carol Burnett Show.[2] But this wasn’t the first time Mackie laid eyes on Peters; he saw her in the off-Broadway production of Dames at Sea, a spoof of the Busby Berkeley movies of the 1930s. Carol Burnett also saw Peters in the show and was so impressed that she invited Peters to appear on The Carol Burnett Show.[3]

According to Mackie, Peters was the first guest star booked for the variety show.[4] Mackie remembered Peters first stint with The Carol Burnett Show as follows: “She had on sort of thrift shop clothes and she had a little doggy in her purse and everybody fell in love with her.”[5] For her part, Peters remembered that she “fell in love with” Mackie when she worked on the show.[6]

Their relationship became a pivotal one for Peters. After getting to know her on The Carol Burnett Show, Mackie began making costumes for her stage work. He designed the costumes for one of her first Broadway outings, a revival of On the Town,[7] but he also furnished her with costumes for the summer stock shows that she often did in the early 1970s. Peters recalled,

"I was going out at certain times to do summer stock, and he said, 'Oh gee, well you really should look nice. What are you going to wear?' And I said, 'Well, they have a little seamstress there, designing the costumes.' And he said, 'Well, maybe I should just send you off with some costumes just in case.' And he just gave them to me to take with me, to make sure that I would look good."[8]

A few years later when Peters moved to Hollywood in the mid-1970s, Mackie designed a “mini wardrobe” for her because her manager, Tom Hammond, said that she didn’t have anything appropriate to wear to the events she was invited to.[9] In an interview with Bob Lardine from 1976, she said, “Sure, I’d like to buy a whole bunch of outfits, […] but there are no stores out here where you can buy them. The new styles don’t intrigue me that much, anyhow. Luckily, Bob Mackie designed some clothes for me and that constitutes my wardrobe now.”[10] Lardine introduces this comment remarking that “her money certainly doesn’t go for clothes,” suggesting that, like the summer stock costumes, Mackie “just gave them” to Peters at no cost.[11] When she presented Mackie with the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, she made the subtext explicit—Mackie supported her with these costumes early in her career while she was less financially secure: “When I had my first little nightclub act, I didn’t have money for a dress […] and Bob said, ‘No, no—wait, wait.’ And he went into his archives and he pulled out a dress and he remade it totally for me.”[12]

Peters and Mackie’s relationship continued to flourish even as Peters’ star ascended with high profile films like The Jerk (1979) and Pennies from Heaven (1981), the latter for which she won a Golden Globe award.[13]

The film’s sole Oscar nomination was for Mackie’s costumes and as a promotional gambit Peters appeared on the cover of Playboy the month Pennies came out, and the magazine ran photos of her in vintage lingerie from different eras, all designed by Mackie.[14]

Mackie still designs all of Peters’ concert looks and he even designed Peters’ wedding gown in 1996.[15]

Re-wearing Mackie clothing isn’t a new thing for Peters—she told Frank DeCaro, the author of Unmistakably Mackie (1999), that she “still wear[s]” her favorite Mackie, “a black, strapless, hammered satin dress,” that she wore at least as early as 1980 to the American Music Awards.[16]