From PEOPLE Magazine
Click to enlarge
It's a good thing, too. What would Hollywood do without its annual love-hate institution? Last week, Blackwell released his 25th anniversary list, topped by Cher. "Any attempt to look more masculine and she will need the operation," he sniped. He also spewed his venom on the likes of, among others, perennial Barbra Streisand ("She looks like a masculine Bride of Frankenstein") and Dynasty's Joan Collins and Diahann Carroll ("They look like a pair of burnt-out Christmas trees"). But underneath this acid veneer is a man with a heart, however minute it may be. "I have never ridiculed a star who was going through major personal problems," he says proudly. "That's not my style." Besides, he claims people are clamoring to make the list. And being dropped is nearly as bad as not being named at all, he insists, citing the time former winner (or is it loser?) Lynn Redgrave cornered him at a party and demanded to know why she'd been left off, claiming, "I haven't improved any."
Blackwell was an unknown designer when he started the list as an alternative to the popular International Best Dressed List put out by publicist Eleanor Lambert. "My first two years in the business I was nice as hell, and nobody gave me the time of day," says Black-well. "The year the list came out everybody was mad as hell. They said, 'Who the hell does Blackwell think he is?' They made me a name."
His mean streak may be rooted in a tough childhood. Born Richard Sylvan Selzer in a seedy section of Brooklyn, he was a "love child" who "never knew who my father was" and was so poor "if I got anything to eat, it was because I stole it." After being booted out of assorted homes for wayward boys (he has only a fifth-grade education), he got lucky in 1936 when a Broadway producer, scouring the city for authentic street urchins, gave Blackwell a part in The Dead End Kids. "My character was named Ears," he reports. "I was a natural. My own stood out like open taxi doors until I had surgery."
After appearing on Broadway and later in the Kids films, he was discovered again in 1944, this time by Howard Hughes, who saw him in Catherine Was Great on Broadway. Hughes thought Blackwell (whose stage name then was Dick Ellis) a "real Corsican-lover type" and brought him to Hollywood with a seven-year contract and changed his name to Richard Blackwell. But after bit parts in two dozen films, his career was going nowhere, and he became a personal manager. The clothes that Blackwell draped over his clients drew more raves than their talent, so in 1957 he pooled $5,000 with business partner Robert Spencer to open Mr. Black-well Designs. Today, he claims, the company is worth more than $3 million. He caters to the older Hollywood set; his clients include Jane Wyman, Loretta Young and Jane Russell.
Blackwell, an avid art collector, shares a 21-room Mediterranean-style mansion outside L.A. with Spencer, 60ish. The house is sprinkled with originals by Renoir and Van Dyck. A favorite collectible is a cup that Blackwell says was used to poison an Emperor of China. "Maybe it's best that I own it," he says. "Who is more poisonous than me?"
Nobody, maybe. But Blackwell, whose sense of self-importance is matched only by his flair for self-promotion, is hardly content to rest on his annual dressings down. He's writing a "major exposé" of the fashion industry, which he says already considers him "a genuine pain in the ass." The book will undoubtedly add to his enemies' list. Characteristically, the thought rather pleases him. For when it is time for him to meet that Great Designer in the Sky, Blackwell expects a Standing Room Only send-off. "Everyone will show up to see if I am really gone," he boasts. And, of course, to see if he's appropriately dressed for the journey.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
