Katherine Wikoff

My daughter and I were talking about famed costume designer Bob Mackie yesterday and realized that not only is he still alive but he just had a birthday earlier this week (March 24).

I thought he must be close to 100 years old, but he’s only 86! It just feels like he should be 100 because he’s been so successful for such a long, long time. He started out working as a designer at Paramount when he was only 21 years old!

I personally first became aware of Bob Mackie through his work with Cher’s fabulous outfits on the old “Sonny and Cher” show in the early-to-mid-1970s.

Farrah Fawcett and Cher wearing Bob Mackie gowns on “The Sonny and Cher Show,” CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Only later did I realize that Bob Mackie also designed costumes for Carol Burnett’s TV show. And later still that I discovered he has worked extensively, for decades, with Diana Ross, as well. However, only this week did I find out, from my daughter, that Mackie designed (or, at least, did “the initial sketch of,” according to his Wikipedia article) Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Happy birthday, Mr. President” dress, worn at the 1962 Madison Square Garden event celebrating John F. Kennedy’s birthday.

So, wow. Here’s the link to Bob Mackie’s Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Mackie. There’s lots of fun information in here, including (for film buffs like me) the fact that early on in his career at Paramount, Mackie was “found” (discovered?) by legendary costume designer Edith Head (Wikipedia article HERE).

My favorite Bob Mackie gown ever, was apparently many other people’s favorite gown, as well. Can you guess? It was the green velvet “curtain” dress from Carol Burnett’s Gone With the Wind sketch (titled “Went With the Wind” on the show), which I am old enough to remember seeing during its initial broadcast in November 1976.

It’s possible that young people (born, say, from 1990 on) who watch the clip below won’t “get” the humor, and if that’s the case, it’s likely because they’re unaware of the original scene referenced.

One reason Carol Burnett’s sketch was so hilarious was that the 1939 film Gone With the Wind (“born” the same year as Bob Mackie, I just realized!) was rereleased in movie theaters numerous times from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. So almost everyone watching Carol Burnett that evening would have remembered the beautiful green velvet dress that Scarlett O’Hara made out of draperies still hanging in the ruins of Tara, the family’s plantation home, at the end of the Civil War so that wealthy Rhett Butler would believe that everything was fine in her life and she had sought him out because she loved him, not because she was destitute and hoping to trick him into giving her the money needed to pay the taxes on Tara.

No doubt, even if you’ve never seen that GWTW movie scene, the Carol Burnett dress works as a sight gag. But the humor is all the richer if you can make the instant, unspoken connection between the elegant velvet gown worn by Scarlett in the movie and the curtain-rod-with-tassled-tiebacks gown worn by “Starlett” in the Carol Burnett show.

Here is the complete “Went With the Wind” sketch. The idea for the curtain dress first enters Starlett’s mind at around the 13-minute mark, with the “unveiling” so to speak occuring at the 15:08 mark.

And below is a short clip of Bob Mackie talking about the curtain dress in an interview.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love that this dress is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History! It brings together an unusual variety of historical threads: the Civil War, the novel Gone With the Wind, the film Gone With the Wind, Bob Mackie and his role in entertainment history, and the American television broadcast industry. All of which come together, beautifully and humorously, in this single, highly imaginative ensemble 🙂