PATRICK KELLY, JUDY GARLAND, JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS, & MAYA ANGELOU
OR: ANOTHER KIND OF MISSISSIPPI SISSY, BUT THE SAME
[EDITOR’S NOTE: With this essay and short story, I am inaugurating THE WEEKEND READ which you will be receiving on Saturdays. Sometimes the THE WEEKEND READ will be written by me, as this initial one is. At other times, it will be curated and I will send along something I have found of interest by another writer in the past.]
(Above, Patrick Kelly photographed by Oliviero Toscani)
“I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown ... I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom,” wrote Richard Wright. “I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that someday I might understand it.”
Wright was born on September 4, 1908, in Roxie, Mississippi. He died on November 28, 1960, in Paris, France. Fashion designer Patrick Kelly was born on September 24, 1954, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He died on January 1, 1990, in Paris as well. And it was on this date - April 23 - Judy Garland gave her legendary concert at Carnegie Hall in 1961. It was a Sunday. Patrick Kelly was 6 years old and, I imagine, waking up to go to church that day with his mother and his grandmother, the latter the woman who taught him to sew. I wrote about that imagined morning in the first chapter of a book proposal I put together about his life. Not much is known about his childhood because, as his longtime lover, Bjorn Amelan, who is Bill T. Jones’s husband, told me when I was doing my research for the proposal, Kelly conjured many narratives about being a sissy African American boy back in Mississippi and it became increasingly difficult to sort out all the threads of that narrative - some silken, others tattered, many just too knotted.
I had planned to write a new kind of book. I would fashion a biography of his adult years but his childhood would be novelistic, the latter a kind of heightened sort of fiction based on all that research I was doing. I called the proposal P.K. - A Real-Life Fairytale with an Imagined Childhood because the fabulous Patrick Kelly could be a fabulist about those first years of his life Mississippi. He cunningly costumed himself not only in his beloved overalls, which became a kind of trademark for him, but also in a reconfigured sort of southernness just as he reconfigured its visual racist tropes to trick out the designs he conjured. By contextualizing these tropes anew and daring to anoint them as objects of beauty that enhanced his redefinition of what beauty could be, he believed he was denying the racist tropes their earlier crueler power to wound and insult and diminish. You could have seen much of this in San Francisco during a retrospective of his work closing on April 24 at the The deYoung Museum. You will get another chance however. The exhibition will travel this summer to The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, were it will run from June 25 to November 6.
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art also houses several of his designs and during Black History Month back in February, Sequoia Barnes, the Gerald and Mary Ellen Ritter Memorial Fund Fellow at the Institute, wrote an essay about Kelly published by the Met. “Those who remember Kelly tend to cite his signature buttons and bows, which adorned every garment in every season during the very brief height of his career, from 1985 until his untimely death due to complications from AIDS in 1990,” she wrote. “But for me, the most important element of his designs is his use of racist imagery. A Black queer creative from Mississippi, Kelly took images that signified the stain of America’s foundations in brutality, displacement, and oppression and turned them into something that I can only describe as a radical Black camp aesthetic. Kelly was not afraid to go there, like the Black radical artists before him, such as Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and Robert Colescott, who also reappropriated racist images of Black people to expose and confront what many of us are so desperate to avoid, those disgusting images and objects from America’s not-so-distant past: mammies and golliwogs, wide-smiling caricatures of minstrels eating watermelon, postcards showing little Black children being eaten by alligators. Kelly was no stranger to these images, having grown up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, one of the American hotbeds of violence during the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement …
“Kelly collected pickaninny artifacts among many other racist and non-racist objects symbolic of Black people’s history in America,” she continued. “I want to focus on the pickaninny figure in the context of Kelly’s Black baby-doll pins, which were ‘inspired’ by the racist depiction. According to the journalist and author Robin Givhan, at his runway shows, Kelly ‘would always give everyone in his audience a tiny brown doll with molded black hair that could be most accurately described as a pickaninny.’ Kelly’s partner in life, Bjorn Amelan, once told Givhan, ‘[Kelly] would purchase these little black dolls made out of plastic—600 a month. People would volunteer and with a glue gun attach pins to the back. He would never leave without stuffing his pockets with them.’”
(Above, Patrick Kelly’s gravesite at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris)
Kelly became a star after not only overcoming the brutal racism of his 1960s Mississippi boyhood, but also the more refined racism found in the fashion world of New York City once he arrived there in 1979. Model Pat Cleveland was his mentor and advised him to go to Paris a year later - she gave him the money for the airfare - where she hoped the African American diaspora that had delivered so many men and women to their truest selves in France would deliver him to his as well. She was prescient. In 1987, with the sponsorship of Sonia Rykiel among others, Patrick Kelly became the first American member of the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, the governing body of the French ready-to-wear industry, which entitled him to show his designs in the Louvre.
Before I set out to write about Patrick Kelly, I was experiencing a bit of doubt about it. Even though I am queer and from Mississippi and HIV positive, I am not African American so I questioned whether I was the right person to write this heightened biography of this heightened life. Was a white queer HIV positive Mississippian writing about an African American queer Mississippian who died of AIDS still an act of appropriation? And yet I felt drawn to the subjects that Kelly kept inspiring within me, especially the sissy Mississippi childhood. I decided to set aside my cultural apprehensions and took a tentative look into Kelly’s archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I first read Maya Angelou’s book proposal about Kelly. “Are you aware that by the time he was 8 or 9 years of age whenever his mother was angry with him she would simply lock the door at night, and he would have to sleep on the porch?” Angelou asked in the proposal. “I don’t know many ways in which a person can survive that level of cruelty. There was the kindness of his grandmother which I have heard about, and maybe that explains his survival, but I would have to write that in order to see it,” she continued, seeming to have landed on the same way into his story: imagining his childhood in a novelistic way. “What compels a person, born into such seeming hopelessness, to escape?” she asked. “I can’t imagine it. In that conundrum lies the fascinating story of Patrick Kelly.”
(Above, the cover I designed for the book proposal I wrote and put together.)
All the resultant correspondence around that proposal by Angelou charted its troubled detours in publishing until it reached a dead-end. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, was a big fan of his and had initially contacted Angelou about writing a book about him after his death. There was a contract ready to be signed but Angelou’s agent insisted that Random House, Angelous’s publisher, be given a chance to match Doubleday’s offer and have a right-of-first refusal. This angered Doubleday’s then-president, Stephen Rubin, who made his anger clear to Jackie in a letter. Random House turned down the project so Angelou and her agent went back to Doubleday. Rubin, still angry, refused to offer them the deal again. Many letters flew back and forth. Jackie finally got him to agree to reconsider.
The lack of humility among the lawyers and different agents, all with a stake in the outcome, and the hard-won lack of it in Angelou still hummed from the cache of letters. Rubin’s reconsideration was based on his insistence that Angelou and her agent accept a lesser offer. They held out for the original one. Jackie had to travel to Los Angeles on other business and scheduled a lunch at the Polo Lounge with Maya Angelou who also happened to be out there. Jackie waited at a secluded table but Angelou stood her up - or so the letters attest. Rubin was livid. Jackie let the project go. Angelou and her agent went to lots of publishing houses but the kind of book they envisioned - which I presume was the one Jackie had had in mind - was a lavishly produced oversized one with lots of illustrations and photographs. That, coupled with Angelou’s demand for a big advance, proved too rich for everyone they contacted. If Maya Angelou couldn’t get a book about Kelly published - if Jackie Kennedy couldn’t - then what made me think I could? Although Amelan had informed me that an academic was doing a critical study to be published as a biography and had already interviewed some members of Patrick’s family, I still thought I had a unique way into his narrative. I wanted to adorn the biography of him I was creating with a conjured southernness just as he had adorned his own creations with his conjured one.
I dug deeper that day into his archives at the Schomburg Center. I read magazine articles. I read other letters. I read get-well cards once Kelly became so infirm from AIDS. I read the condolence cards written to his lover Bjorn Amelan. I read a list compiled by Patrick of the things he loved which was typed on the letterhead of his fashion company. PATRICK KELLY’S LOVE LIST was at the top of the page. Then,
I Love: Families, especially Grandmothers and Mothers; Nice People; Work Vacations; Fried Chicken and “Foie Gras” and “Fauchon” Croissants; Buttons and Bows; Dolls; Hats; Gardenias; Pearls and Popcorn; Pretty Things; Madame Grès; Pretty Girls and Valentine Candy Boxes and Fried Catfish; All Women (Fat, Skinny and Between ...); Lycra Dresses and Spare Ribs; Non-Smokers; Ethel Rainey; Martin Luther King; Bette Davis - Josephine Baker and Pat Cleveland; Connie; Parties;“I Love Lucy”; Music : Gospel, Loud, Classical, Rap, Jazz, Soul, Luther Vandross; Big Overalls; Birthdays and Christmas; Paris in the Springtime, in the Fall, in the Winter; BUT ESPECIALLY IN MISSISSIPPI - Churches; Buttons, Buttons, Buttons; Fun; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and You!
After reading Gloria Steinem’s eulogy for his memorial service at F.I.T. with her handwritten notes along its margins, I retrieved the red-bound guest books from that memorial service and, opening them, read the myriad signatures and messages inside. As I read them, the scourge of AIDS and the loss of this brilliant young man’s life began to conflate with the memory of so many others I had known and lost. I sat at the Schomburg Center that day and was surprised that I sill held so many tears after all these years. But the tears did come. They came. And as they came, I continued to read through the names of guests at Patrick Kelly’s memorial service. Then on one of the pages blurred by my tears, I finally saw it. The date of Patrick Kelly’s memorial service: March 28, 1990. Disbelieving, I turned page after page and saw it again and again: 3/28, March 28, 3-28, 28 March 1990. On and on. Name after name. Message after message. March 28th is my birthday.
I took it as an omen that I was on the right track, a message from Patrick. It felt in that moment as if we were each the other’s answered prayer. Pat Cleveland had told me, in fact, about Patrick’s trusting in prayer - his insistence on it actually. Patrick Kelly talked about God, she said, as easily as he did six- gore skirts with godets. She also told me he kept a Mississippi skillet in his Paris atelier. It was a place, she recalled recounting her many visits there with him, that atelier which was a manifestation of that Mississippi heart of his, where couture was conjured and cornbread was cooked and prayers were said. That was to be the feel of the book I had set out to write. That was to be the heady, down-home smell of it. That was, yes, Miss Angelou, the conundrum I was going to try to decipher as I hoped to conjure myself a new kind of book which would center on this courageous, talented man. Patrick Kelly journeyed forth away from home and toward it, a diaspora that detoured toward death but did not stop there. His heightened life seemed to determining it was time again to sally forth and have its say. I would serve its sallying. I had hoped to offer it another kind of runway. I had hoped to write a preening, prayerful book.
But it wasn’t meant to be. It broke my heart but did not break me. That is finally the lesson I took from it all. Each publisher who turned it down - there were many - commented on the brilliance of the writing but how difficult it would be to market such a book. Its hybrid quality would confuse both bookstores - in which section would it belong - as well as readers. I was told to jettison the novelistic approach when writing about the childhood and write a “straight biography,” a loaded term full of irony lost on those writing the rejection letters. But to surrender to that demand would mean writing from the starting point of resentment. Do all Mississippi sissies no matter our color start from such a point in life anyway? Maybe I should have stirred that deeper resentment and utilized that and pleased them in ways they weren’t even aware they were being pleased. Maybe that was the source of Patrick Kelly’s brilliant rise and tragic end. Raised in resentment, he religiously razed it, refashioned it. His narrative was as deeply true and deceptive as prayer itself. He just kept trying to find his way to an amen.
(Above: A bodice of button designed by Patrick Kelly)
(Above: Patrick Kelly and two of his muses: his grandmother Ethel Rainey and Madame Grès. Vanity Fair ran a controversial profile of Kelly by Ben Brantley in March 1988 because of its Annie Leibovitz photographs that incorporated white models in blackface. Brantley wrote: “He talks, lyrically, about his grandmother Ethel Rainey, who still lives in Vicksburg and who introduced him to fashion by bringing home copies of Vogue and Bazaar from the houses of people she cooked for. She is ‘the most chic of all the people I ever worshiped or wanted to be around. More than any Garbo, than any Dietrich. And I never destroyed that with any of the other fake fantasies that I saw. She was the chic-est thing. I’m saying down to her white uniform, with her, honey, lace apron that looked like a tutu.’”)
Here is the first chapter of the book proposal that I wrote as a kind of short story:
(TO READ THIS FIRST CHAPTER OF THE BOOK, SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS.)