Cover image of “Smash Cut” courtesy of Harper Collins
When I bought Brad Gooch’s book “Scary Kisses” over 20 years ago, I thought the only thing we shared or would ever share was our last name. Decades later I discovered that we had other things in common, some of the same fashion acquaintances, similar fashion experiences, and maybe a personality flaw of being interested in too many things at one time.
We also share an urban perspective of how New York City has changed. If you’ve lived in the Big Apple long enough, you’ve witnessed the evolution of this urban terrain from a soiled artists’ cultural mecca to a shining metropolis with very expensive real estate, pushing artists to Williamsburg, the South Bronx, and unthinkable hinterlands. The fashion industry has also morphed from an inner sanctum of design excellence inhabited by fashion elites and a few fortunate insiders to a community controlled, buttressed, and financed by corporate interests and global merchandising.
Brad Gooch in his new book “Smash Cut: a Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and 80s” details the rugged individualism of New York City of the late 70s juxtaposed against the changing tides of the “Greed is Good” 80s. All the cultural influences of that time are intertwined with Gooch’s long-term relationship with filmmaker Howard Brookner.
The day after “Smash Cut’s” release, in a phone interview Brad Gooch spoke with Fashion Reverie about his relationship with Howard Brookner, his experiences as a male model, and change.
Fashion Reverie: In your first book “Scary Kisses” you fictionally detail your experiences as a male model and NYC in the late 70s and early 80s. That said; in your memoir “Smash Cut,” you re-examine that pivotal time in your life. Why a memoir at this time in your life?
Brad Gooch: A part of it which I talk about in the prologue is moving back to Chelsea with my current partner, realizing that I was living across the street from the Chelsea Hotel where I had lived three decades ago with my then boyfriend, Howard Brookner. Later, Howard Brookner died from AIDS while living in London Terrace, also in Chelsea.
I realized after moving back to Chelsea how different things are now as compared to then. It was almost like living on a different planet. The Chelsea Hotel—which was a bohemian, artist haunt when we lived there—is now being transformed into a luxury boutique hotel. Gay life in Chelsea is hardly recognizable compared to what it was in the late 70s and early to mid-80s. I now have a newborn baby and in some states same sex marriage is legal. All these things were incomprehensible in the 70s and 80s … all these things triggered memories of my life with Howard Brookner and what our life was like at that time. That is what began the process of writing the book.
Image courtesy of huffingtonpost.com
FR: How did you come up with the title “Smash Cut”?
Brad Gooch: Smash Cut is a film editing term and this book is about my love relationship with Howard Brookner. Howard was a filmmaker and in the 70s Smash Cut was something that downtown filmmakers were fond of when you juxtapose one image against a striking, different image. It is used a lot in science fiction films. So this book is about a “Smash Cut” of what my life is now compared to what it was then. Also, in this period AIDS smashed into the romantic 70s period transforming the landscape into a horrifying period. So, my life and life in Manhattan had this traumatic, violent shift.
FR: In some interviews you have spoken about that time in NYC as a “Lost Atlantis,” why that reference?
Brad Gooch: Again, there was something halcyon and romantic about that period. There are some celebrities in the book like Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and William Burroughs. But NYC was a small, insular world at that time and you could easily meet a lot of famous people. Williams Burroughs lived half a block from me. I met Robert Mapplethorpe at the infamous Mineshaft and he took test shoots of me for my modeling portfolio. I met Andy Warhol in Paris when I was modeling. It was more intimate world in that sense.
AIDS radically changed everything in NYC and I think the world would be radically different if some of the artists that succumbed to the disease were still around. There would be more continuity from then to now if some of those people were still here.
FR: Fashion is all about change, what may be trending now, will not be trending tomorrow. It seems that this memoir is a reflection on change. Could you speak about that?
Brad Gooch: In the book the radical change was between the 70s and the 80s. Change in the fashion world was seismic. People wanted to be poets and artists. People weren’t celebrity-career driven. The downtown scene was revolutionary, sexy, young, and kind of utopian, well almost. The 80s became the flip—and I was a part of it in a way. Instead of Frank O’Hara being the dominant bohemian literary figure, it was Andy Warhol and his interest in celebrities.
I was writing for Vanity Fair in the late-70s while teaching at Columbia and working on my PHD. And suddenly there was this radical change and some of my students were thinking about getting an MBA. It was jarring in a certain way. It was the Reagan era. All this contributed to a very different mood.
When I started modeling in Europe I was in Thierry Mugler’s first big fashion show where he was promoting the big shoulder, power suit for women; that all came tellingly with the 80s. People were steeling themselves in a certain way.
Image from Turbeville’s “Unseen Versailles” courtesy of loelaphotographie.com
FR: How did modeling happen for you and what was the experience like?
Brad Gooch: I was walking down the street one day and met Paul Rackley, a booker at Elite Model Management. He put a buzz in my brain about modeling, and I wanted to have an adventure.
Eric Boman was a friend of friend and he took some test pictures of me and booked me for a job for a Bloomingdales’ ad in The New York Times. I still at that point didn’t have an agency. At that time, I was a teaching assistant in the Shakespeare department at Columbia University. Another teaching assistant at Columbia who was friends with Deborah Turbeville turned me on to Deborah. She was doing a photo book on the backrooms of Versailles, “ Unseen Versailles,” with Jackie Onassis as her editor. I did this job for Vogue Patterns with her.
Anyway, Elite ended up not signing me. I met with Eileen Ford at Ford Models and also Zoli, and finally I signed with Wilhelmina. Wilhelmina who was still alive at the time, liked me and the all-American athletic male model boom was just starting. I was more European looking and shorter (5`11), so I didn’t fit into this all-American aesthetic and they sent me to Europe.
Bruce Weber kind of pioneered that all-American aesthetic, marrying striking good looks with athleticism. Scouts would scourer Ivy League campuses and find tall, fit guys who were on the rowing teams, lacrosse and fencing teams. In the 80s we really put male models on the map. Being a male model at that time was like being in the Foreign Legion. You really had to be a free spirit to be successful at it.
In the meantime, Robert Mapplethorpe took some test shots of me because he was getting interested in fashion photography. Anyway, neither one of us really knew what we were doing. Robert liked to work with a lot of cocaine, and by the time we started shooting, the images were too graphic for my portfolio.
FR: So, modeling in Europe was diametrically different than modeling in the US.
Yes, there was this real divide in the fashion industry at that time. America was much more commercial with an emphasis on sportswear and Europe was more sophisticated and artsy, and where you sent models to get great tear sheets when they were just starting out.
When I got to Milan, they put me up in this penzione and it seemed no one was really expecting me. Wilhelmina paid for everything, but in the end I owned the agency a lot of money. These penziones were filled with these aspiring, young American models trying to get some tear sheets and some work. Most these models were from small towns and in Europe for the first time.
Immediately, I was up for some really big campaigns with Armani and Versace. I landed some really significant work, but my real motivation was I wanted to write a novel based on my experiences as a male model. I would say I had a B model career of which I wrote an essay about for Harper’s Bazaar.
I was in a lot of magazines. I was in GQ a few times, l’Uomo Vogue, German Vogue and many of the other European versions of Vogue, as well as other European men’s fashion magazines. I also worked with some famous photographers from Aldo Fallai to Biscati and walked in the Pierre Cardin shows. I walked in a Pierre Cardin show with Mario Van Peebles that was kind of unorganized, but fun nonetheless.
Coincidentally, a lot of the European photographers really didn’t appreciate that I was educated and spoke a few languages. They kind of wanted the Midwest dumb jock prototype that I wasn’t. Anyway, it was all these things about modeling that made it interesting to write about.
FR: Were you in a relationship with Howard Brookner at the time you were modeling?
Brad Gooch: Yes, we had been involved since 1978. And that is detailed in the book. While I was modeling in Milan, he was back in the States. But, he would come over in August and we would vacation together on this island off the coast of Sicily. We would have dinner with Pierre Cardin, Pierre Berge, and producer Thomas Armand. Things were more casual at that time, so you could meet really interesting people.
FR: You started out modeling to get source material for a novel. You thought it would be a “pose within a pose,” but over time you got sucked into the industry. How did that happen?
Brad Gooch: If you do something for any length of time, getting sucked in can happen. The spell burst when I came back to NYC and I really had more of a real life. But, when I was modeling I mostly around fashion industry folks. I was thrown into an “Alice and Wonderland World” when I modeled in Europe, which had a certain appeal. Still, I never got totally drawn into having my picture taken, and there were certain models that came to life when the camera was pointed at them. I was not one of those people which is probably why I didn’t advance from being a B to an A model.
Image courtesy of interviewmagazine.com
FR: You lived quite the bacchanalian life, as many people did, but your life is very different now. When did it all start to change?
Brad Gooch: It really started to change with the AIDS years and the death of Howard in 1989. I went into a dark depression after that and feeling shell shocked and lost. Coming out of that, I felt that I had a second act in the late 90s that dovetailed with changes in American society.
One of the things that came out of the AIDS crisis were these political and legal changes in gay culture. It makes a big difference to be able to legally be married and to have your life legally protected by law.
FR: You’ve written an eclectic range of topics from Flannery O’Connor to Frank O’ Hara to “Scary Kisses” and now “Smash Cut.” Why such eclecticism?
Brad Gooch: I guess it is because I have ADD (laughingly). No, looking back writers of yore were men of letters. John Milton was Secretary of State and he wrote plays, essays, and lyric poems. I think that is a part of it and I am curious about a lot of things. But the eclecticism is not a fetish. I came out of the 70s so I still see writing as experimental, so there is a desire to try new things and experiment with different writing forms.
Image courtesy of vebidoo.com
FR: What’s next for you?
Brad Gooch: I have been working on this biography of Rumi, a 13th Century Sufi poet, for five years; so that is not entirely new although it is not finished. He is the best selling poet in America now. I have been learning Persian, and traveling to Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia. There has been so much research with Rumi that “Smash Cut” is almost a rebellion against that in that I am writing about something I intimately know about, my life.
“Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the 70s and 80s” is published by Harper Collins.
—William S. Gooch
Your blog post was like a warm hug on a cold day. Thank you for spreading positivity and kindness through your words.