The Tragic Darkness Behind Dr. Fredric Brandt’s Extreme Façade

The suicide of the dermatologist shocked his adoring clients. Did a sitcom caricature of the doctor's inimitable style deliver the coup de grâce?

‘So, when are you going to write about me?” This is what Fred Brandt would say to me instead of hello for the last year and a half, a year and a half ago being the precise moment Vanity Fair began to take an interest, give me the time of day, flirt back, i.e., publish my pieces. Since Fred and I saw each other semi-regularly, you’d think the question would’ve stopped throwing me for a loop, only it never did. It was a teasing one, obviously, and the thing to do was respond in kind, get off a snappy line, then move on. Just as I was about to, though, I’d notice how steady his gaze was, how serious and watchful, and confusion would make me quiet. Should I believe his tone or his look? I alwaysâ€"alwaysâ€"picked look. He was, after all, Dr. Fredric Brandt, the King of Collagen, the Baron of Botox, the Svengali of Skin Care, and other alliterative epithets signifying style and flash and glamour and hullabaloo and general hot-stuffness, and not at all un-up this magazine’s alley. And I became convinced that this time he meant it, was real­ly asking. I’d open my mouth, start to offer an explanation, stumbling and sincere, and, as soon as I did, he’d burst into laughter. Fred’s laugh was unlike anyone else’s. It was heaving and at top volume and had an actual ha-ha in it and a lot of neck and shoulder and was completely spastic and maniacal. Completely irresistible too.

He’d gotten me again.

Fred and I were close, but in a funny way because we barely knew each other. The relationship was almost entirely by proxy. I’m married to a doctor, Robert Anolikâ€"Robâ€"and Fred was Rob’s boss. The official term, I believe, was “associate,” but really, boss. Which was why my writing about Fred was so totally out of the question. That it isn’t anymore is the saddest thing in the world. See, Fred committed suicide, hanged himself in the garage of his Miami home during the early morning hours of Sunday, April 5, Easter Sunday, as it so happened. He was 65 years old, though it feels strange to assign him an age, since not looking his was so much what he was about. In any case, now that he’s dead little niceties like conflict of interest no longer apply or matter.

Celebrity Skin

Rob started working with Fred five years ago. He’d finished his residency in dermatology at N.Y.U., then did a fellowship in laser and skin surgery with Dr. Roy Geronemus. Roy is the director of the Laser & Skin Surgery Center of New York, which Fred was part of but separate from, his own thingâ€"like Monaco is to France or Angelina Jolie is to the Voight clan. Fred’s practice was crazily, freakily, out-of-this-worldily fancy. Glitz galore. Starsâ€"movie, rock, and popâ€"television personalities and fashion models and professional athletes, round-the-clock talk-show hostsâ€"morning, afternoon, and late-nightâ€"princesses from small, oil-rich countries, tycoons who jetted around in, well, jets, whispered in presidents’ ears, owned vineyards in Napa Valley, castles painted by Monet, Monets. Tycoons’ dependents too, naturally. It seemed like you were only eligible to fill out a patient form if Jacqueline Susann, God rest her soul, could’ve swapped out a few vowels in your name, stuck you in one of her written-in-­lipstick-and-eyebrow-pencil roman à clef lives-of-the-rich-and-fucked jobs. And speaking of names, I could drop dozens on you here, but I’m just going to drop one, since it’s big enough to knock you out, and since it’s so famous it’s become virtually synonymous with the word: Madonna.

What’s more, Fred didn’t just tend to stars, help them maintain their twinkle and glow. He was one. He hosted his own radio show, the Who’s Who likes of Linda Wells, editor in chief of Allure (patient), and Sally Hershberger and Sharon Dorram, celebrity hairstylist and celebrity colorist, respectively (both patients), and Gwyneth Paltrow, actress and sex symbol (patient), swinging by the SiriusXM studios in Midtown to slip on a set of oversize headphones, talk turkey, or at least turkey neck; guested on Live with Regis and Kelly (Kelly Ripa, patient) and The View (Joy Behar, too); was the subject of features in New York and The New York Times, spreads in L’Uomo Vogue and Elle (Robbie Myers, editor in chief, patient); attended high-profile events with Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, and Naomi Campbell (patient, patient, patient, and patient); and supplied A’s to the Q’s of Stephanie Seymour (patient) and Jane Holzer (patient) in Interview. He also collected artâ€"works by Damien Hirst, Marilyn Minter, and Richard Prince adorned the walls of his various places of labor and leisure. Engaging in acrobatics, possibly sexual, though equally possibly not, at the bottom of the staircase in his Coconut Grove estate were two figures by Keith Haring. Glittering above the bed in his West Chelsea condo like a punctured disco ball was a 24-karat-gold circular plate by Anish Kapoor. And loitering in the waiting area of his East 34th Street office was an Ed Ruscha, surveying the scene and observing with perfect deadpan American cool, Hydraulic Muscles, Pneumatic Smiles. He wore art, too. (I don’t think you could properly call an Alexander McQueen black vinyl vest or Givenchy culottes, cream-colored with a plaid waistband and covered in barking dogs, and paired with leggings, also cream-colored, clothing.) He kept a publicist on retainer.

For years, Fred split his time between his Miami offices, which he opened in 1982, and his Manhattan offices, which he opened in 1998. But by 2010, his Manhattan offices were busy to the point of insanity. If he wanted to keep up with the demand, he’d have to get cloned. Either make a genetically identical copy of himself, or train somebody in his methods and techniques. He went with bachelor number two, which ended up being Rob, though Rob no longer was one. (We’d gotten married the month before.)

Obviously I can’t even feign objectivity here. I think Rob’s greatâ€"the best. He’s smart and thoughtful, and understands everything and fast, and is an easy laugher and good company. And in addition to these generally stellar qualities, he’s in possession of a highly specific one: he’s a natural-born straight man. In fact, he’s a straight man twice over. Is a foil to a wilder and more outlandish partner in a comedy act, and is a heterosexual male (in case you didn’t want to make any assumptions about Fred’s orientation based on the barking-dog culottes, I’m telling you now: make those assumptions). The latter contributed to the former as Rob’s doop-dee-doop-dee-do regular-guyness was a source of endless amusement to Fred, who would pre­tendâ€"or maybe not pretend, maybe actually experienceâ€"horror at Rob’s clothes (not that bad, just unimaginative) and Rob’s haircut, which Fred would refer to alternately as “accountant hair” and “middle-­management hair” (that bad). This isn’t to say Fred couldn’t be his own straight man. He had a passion for real estate, and one Saturday, he and Rob, after doing the radio showâ€"that week’s topic, sun exposure and overuse of Botox, the title “Global Warming, Frozen Faces”; Fred couldn’t resist a punâ€"and then stopping by Barneys to check out what was outré and à la mode and ooh-la-la and in his size, went to see a penthouse that had recently become available on Central Park South. As they stepped into the elevator to return to the lobby, Fred tapped the one-sheet musingly against his front tooth and said, “I like it, but can a bottom ever really be on top?”

Chemistry between two people is a mysterious thing. Who knows why Fred and Rob had it? All I know is that they did, and that Rob loved working for Fred. Fred was only superficially superficial. Beneath the couture, haute, and the monde, hauter, he was a serious guy. Formidable. The Real Deal. A revolutionary in the field of cosmetic dermatology, he was among the first to see how rich the potential of botulinum toxins (Botox) truly was. He understood that a chorus girl should be the headliner, that a side effect of Botox, the smoothing away of wrinkles, was more dynamic, more charismatic, more vital, than the benefit receiving star billing, the calming of spasming muscles. And I mean really among the first. (He was experimenting with it back in the early 90s.) He also understood that blowing out the odd laugh line was small potatoes as far as Botox’s capabilities were concerned; that it, along with fillers, could, in fact, prop up a collapsing facial structure, if applied with a skilled enough hand, an artistic enough eye. Thanks largely to him, Botox, which he used more than any other doctor on the planet, according to its maker, Allergan, in 2002â€"a little factoid that’s either true true or apocryphal true, i.e., spiritually true, i.e., should be true if it’s not trueâ€"and fillers (Restylane, Juvéderm, etc.) became alternatives to invasive surgery. A face-lift without a single slice or dice, which sounds like a no-brainer except it wasn’t, not initially. As Fred’s publicist, Jacquie Tractenberg, said, “Telling a patient she should let you shoot her face full of poison is not exactly an easy sell.” But Fred sold it. Faces done by Fred, dubbed the “New New Face” by New York, looked fleshed out rather than pulled tight. He was, too, a dedicated researcher, conducting dozens of F.D.A.-approved clinical trials a year at his institute in Miami. And he developed a skin-care line, an attempt to bring his ingenious innovations, only to be had by impossible-to-secure appointment (he was booked months in advance) and for beaucoup bucks (a routine visit could cost you around $7,000), to the masses. He told Allure, just weeks before his death, that his Lines No More serum was the best-selling dermatological beauty product in the world.

Martin Short as Dr. Grant. © Netflix/Photofest.

You’d expect a guy that cerebral to be wearing glasses with lenses as thick as those on the telescopes on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and fraying tweed jackets with elbow patches, clodhopper shoes, which he emphatically was not. You’d also expect him to be a little detached (eggheads, in my experience, tend to be cold fish), but that wasn’t at all the case with Fred. He was warm and generous and affectionate. His practice was almost exclusively cosmetic. Rarely was something ever actually wrong with one of his patients. In fact, your life had to be going pretty A-O.K. swell if you were able to score an appointment with him in the first place. Yet these appointments were often intensely emotional affairs. Beauty fades. That’s just the way it is. Still, it’s a truth that’s tough enough for people with nothing-special looks to accept. Imagine how tough it is for people with faces that are featured in fragrance and soft-drink campaigns, blockbuster motion pictures, the sexual fantasies of millions, not to mention of millionaires, even of billionaires. Seeing him wasn’t about eliminating crow’s-feet and marionette lines. Or, rather, it was only about those things on top. Underneath, it was about staving off the corruption of the body, the rot and decay that inevitably set in. And, going one step further, it was about staving off death, time, the human condition itself.

Fred instinctively understood how potentially fraught the experience of seeing him was, and did all he could to make it less so. He gave the tools of his trade, which sounded weird and sinister and science-fictiony, these cute-as-a-bug nicknames. It wasn’t botu­linum toxin and injectable facial filler, composed of hyaluronic acids and biosynthetic polymers and collagens harvested from pigs and cows andâ€"eekâ€"cadavers. No, it was Bo and Phil, or, I guess, Fill, a couple of brothers who ran a discount furniture store in Queensâ€"“Every day is a sale at Bo and Fill’s!”â€"or a vaudeville act that used to play Kutsher’s in the 50sâ€"Bo juggled, Fill told jokes. Nothing scary about Bo and Fill. Or Fill’s buds, Restie (Restylane) and Juvie (Juvé­derm), equally good-natured and goofball. Nor was your encounter with Bo and Fill going to be furtive and awash in feelings of shame, a sleazy quickie at some no-tell motel with stained mattresses and a guestbook full of Smiths and Joneses. With Bo and Fill everything was friendly and casual, out in the open and aboveboard.

What’s more, for Fred, it was never “a unit of Botox” or “a syringe of filler.” It was “a bissel of Bo” or “a bissel of Fill,” bissel being Yiddish for “small amount.” That Fred knew Yiddish is no surprise, since he was Jewish. He was born on June 26, 1949, and grew up above his parents’ candy shop in Philip Roth Land, the Weequahic section of Newark. It was a background you could hear in his voice, and I always liked that he retained the accent, none of that Jay Gatsby “old sport” business. So many people aspiring to the stat­us of cosmopolitan sophisticate talk like they’re from a European country that doesn’t exist but is class all the way, lots of rope pearls and extended pinkies and tinkly piano music, no chin stubble or action movies or toilets, etc.

And there was more than a little Jewish mother in Fred. He had that genuine and unaffected warmth to him, that nurturing quality. He really did care. He was a loyal and true friend. In the course of researching this piece, I was given countless examples of his un-showy kindness. (One example: Joan Kron, contributing editor-at-large of Allure, told me about the time she called Fred to ask what she should do when her mother, then 103, came down with shingles. Fred ended his day early and hightailed it over bearing advice and a prescription.) And he was known for taking on other doctors’ boners and problem cases, people who’d suffered complications from fillers, seeing them once or twice a week, for a period of up to several months, and without charge. And my earlier crack about his patients fitting the profile of characters in a Jackie Susann novel was just that, a crack, not an accurate statement. Stars got the star treatment from Fred, sure. So did non-stars, though, of which he saw plenty. He’d quote lines from Bette Davis movies, impersonate Joan Crawford, break into “Younger than Springtime”â€"Rodgers and Hammersteinâ€"or rapsâ€"his own composition (to Kelly Ripa: “Oh, Juvéderm / Girl, you so firm”). He’d do everything he could, basically, to relax his patients. Remind them that this wasn’t brain surgery, that this wasn’t even cosmetic surgery. It was a little numbing cream and a couple skin pops. He thus restored not just facial harmony but emotional harmony as well. Put it all in perspective.

So how come he lost his, killed himself?

Platinum Desire

Before we get to that, though, this: Fred was famous for interrupting patients in the middle of a consult and saying, “But enough about how you look. How do I look?,” followed by a wild shriek of laughter. So let’s respect the wishes of the dead, talk about how Fred looked. He may have believed that he looked natural, or at least that he was trying to look natural. (“I think I look natural, don’t you?” was a constant refrain of his, according to friends and co-workers.) I don’t believe he was trying, though. We’ll start with his hair, which was blond, or, rather, platinum blond, which isn’t blond at all. It’s hyper-blond, ultra-blond, blonder than blond. Platinum occurs in nature, has its own seat at the periodic table, but platinum blond is almost always manufactured. That it’s artificial, man-made, not divinely inspired, and less inhuman than anti-human, machine-like, is both the source of its appeal and its entire point. Fake yet openly fake. (None of those pull-a-fast-one highlights that are intended to resemble sun streaks.) Fake yet reveling in its fakeness. Honestly fake. It’s sexâ€"blondes have more fun, right?â€"only it’s about alienation rather than connection, and is thus pornographic. It’s the shade of choice of Andy Warhol, the prophet and visionary of the 20th century who is turning out to be the prophet and visionary of the 21st century as well, and of Marilyn Monroe, the movie star who is THE movie star, more of a movie star than any other movie star before or since, the ne plus ultra of movie stars. You could even argue that platinum is the shade of modernity itself. Or of the apocalypseâ€"the flash of white heat at the heart of an atomic blast.

That was the story at the top of Fred’s head, and it remained the story down to the tips of Fred’s toes. He constructed his physical self, deliberately and with care, as much as he was able. A perfect diet and an hour and a half a day of yoga with a private instructor gave him a body that was as lean and supple as a teenager’s. And he shunned the sun more vigilantly than any bloodsucker, his skin almost phosphorescent in its paleness. Plus, he practiced what he preached, and on himself, over-practiced some might say, injecting Botox and filler into his face until it was unnaturally smooth, without line or crease or pucker or pore. But the unnatural must have been on purpose, since he was so good at making his patients look natural. I mean, right? As hairstylist Garren Defazio, a close friend of Fred’s, said, “Fred always wanted you to look like youâ€"just fresher. Some people expected more from Fred, more of a change. If you saw a patient of his and she looked overdone, it was because she’d insisted. Fred would fight her. ‘Your face isn’t structured for that,’ he’d say. His work was subtle. So the person looked better but like you couldn’t quite put your finger on what was done.” The clothes I’ve already told you aboutâ€"straight off the runway, the kind you thought that no one ever actually wore except he did. (Jacquie Tractenberg remembered Fred showing up at Central Synagogue for Yom Kippur services with her family in a designer kilt and studded sneakers.) He got costumed rather than dressed. Basically, it was as if he were both a person and an object, his own creationâ€"a cross between a science experiment and a work of art, just as he himself was a cross between a mad-genius scientist and a mad-genius artist. Sui generis autogenesis.

I’m going on at such length about Fred’s appearance because it was both extreme and singular, and therefore very easy to parody. Which is what Martin Short did on the Netflix sitcom co-created by Tina Fey, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. That the doctor with the peroxided bob and face of a dissipated cherub, the skin as slick and shiny as a glazed doughnut, whom Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski) visits for a foot face-lift, is intended to be Fred is beyond question. He’s even called Dr. Brandt. Oh no, excuse me, he’s called Dr. Grant, though he pronounces it Franff, the idea being that he’s so hooked on his own product that he’s paralyzed his facial muscles, lost the ability to enunciate certain words, including his name, ha ha. Fred had heard rumors that there was a show with a character who resembled him, but didn’t realize how unflattering the likeness was until “Page Six” ran a story on March 23, two weeks before he killed himself. That night Fred sent Rob a text: “Did u see page 6 I’m so upset I’m a freak.”

Brandt at SiriusXM's New York studio in 2011. By Jason Frank Rothenberg/Art & Commerce.

It probably seems like I’m Mount Rushmore when it comes to Fred, incapable of cracking a smile. Not true. I laughed when Michael K from Dlisted.com anointed him Hot Slut of the Day a couple years ago, describing him as a mélange of “the charisma of Lucius Malfoy, the grace of Glenn Close as Albert Nobbs, a drop of blood from a vampire swan and the judgmental gaze of a snobby ostrich.” Plus which, I love Martin Short. I think that Ed Grimley and Jiminy Glick are lunatic, near sublime comic creations, and that he was the wildest and most low-down character in Inherent Vice. I’ll add, too, that humor is notoriously subjective, very much a tomato/to-mah-to thing. So it doesn’t matter that I didn’t find Dr. Grant funny. You might have. My point, though, is this: if you did, you would have found him just as funny had he been given a less Brandt-like name or a less Brandt-like hairdo. Fred was famous for a dermatologist, i.e., not actually famous. He wasn’t Dr. Oz, never mind Dr. Phil, meaning most viewers wouldn’t have had clue one that it was he who Short and Fey were caricaturing. In fact, pretty much only an industry insider, a percentage of the population so minute it’s, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent, would have caught the reference. Basically then, it’s a joke without a punch line.

So what was it about gentle, unoffending Fred that invited this type of cruelty? Here’s my best guess: people’s feelings about cosmetic enhancement are more complicated than they realize. Darker too. They want it because it can make them look better: younger, prettier, slimmer, perkier-nosed-and-breasted, ears de-Dumboed and eyes de-baggedâ€"whatever their idea of better happens to be. So it’s a wish for self-improvement, which sounds upbeat enough except the wish for self-improvement is rooted in self-dislikeâ€"or at least self-­dissatisfactionâ€"since if you really like something you don’t seek to improve it. Then there’s the feelings of class rage. Cosmetic work gets ever cheaper and easier to obtain. Botox, for example, is being dispensed in nail salons these days. For a serious prac­tition­er, though, one who went to medical school rather than cosmetology, you’ve still got to drop heavy cash. In the old days, youth and beauty were on the short list of things money couldn’t buy. Only now youth and beauty are in on the hustle, too, can be had for the right price. And finally there’s the issue of morality, or rather immorality, because immoral is what cosmetic enhancement is considered, even if those doing the considering would never, not in a million years, use that word, the times we live in being secular ones, religiously unreligious. Yet, much of the instinctive wariness and disapproval of cosmetic enhancement comes, I suspect, from the belief, Puritan in origin, that it’s wrong to interfere with God’s design.

These feelings, in addition to being complicated and dark, are also unconsciousâ€"half conscious at bestâ€"yet demand a release. And a target. Quelle surprise then that Fred, the doctor known for keeping Madonna looking forever not-old, and who himself appeared curiously ageless, should be it. It wasn’t, by the way, only the Kimmy Schmidt people who gave him a tough time. In 2014, Fred was profiled in The New York Times. The comment section was just brutal. Fred, according to the posts, looked “horrifying,” “disgusting,” “grotesque,” “like an 80 year old trying to look 64,” “like a character from a Wes Craven film,” “like an alien.” Kristi Rook, director at Alphaeon, a lifestyle health-care company, and a friend of Fred’s, recommended he steer clear. “I said, ‘Fred, don’t go online.’ ” But Fred wouldn’tâ€"or couldn’tâ€"take the advice. Rob would catch him scrolling through the comments on his phone as they walked home at night: a scab picked off before it even had a chance to form.

To be clear, I’m not saying Times readers didn’t have the right to make those comments. They absolutely did. Just as Tina Fey & Co. had the right to make Fred into a figure of fun. A number of Fred’s friends felt that Kimmy Schmidt had crossed the line because Fred wasn’t a public person, which is not entirely true. There was his radio show, and he had appeared, quite voluntarily, on television. Wanted to appear on television more, in fact. Had pitched Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality program in which he would be the main man/event/attraction/course. Yet the attention he sought caused him pain, or at least the by-product of it did. That he persisted in seeking it proves there was a self-destructive streak in his nature. And, besides, even if he had been a completely private person, he would still be fair game because we all are. You can’t possibly try to impose restrictions on comedy. It won’t work. Comedy defies rules and regulation, is anarchic. Nobody and nothing is out of bounds. The only thing you can hope forâ€"and notice I didn’t say ask forâ€"is decency. Fred, unfortunately, didn’t get it.

Under His Skin

After Fred’s suicide, there was much speculation in the media that Kimmy Schmidt was the cause. For what it’s worth, I think the idea is loony. If the show did, in fact, push him over the edge, that could only be because he had one foot and four toes curled over it already.

Those close to Fred are going to be disappointed with this piece, I just know it. When I was making the rounds, conducting my interviews, the hope was expressed, again and again, both explicitly and implicitly, that I’d put on my Brenda Starr eye shadow, do a little intrepid-girl-reporter digging, figure out who was to blame, smear the guilty party’s name across the pages of this magazine. It was that bitch Tina Fey’s fault. Or Martin Short’s, and I thought he was one of the nice ones. And had I heard that Fred had been down in the dumpsâ€"way, way down in the dumpsâ€"before that garbage show even aired, was seeing a shrink? And how come the will was so hush-hush? What was in it? My advice to you, Lili, follow the money. I’m not going to say anymore than that. Oh, except for thisâ€"wasn’t somebody supposed to be watching Fred that night? Did he/she leave his/her post? On purpose? Fishy, fishy, fishy.

A lot of that kind of talk, which, of course, is just thatâ€"talk. Popular theories as to why Fred was depressed in the first place: getting older (“At his 60th-birthday party, he was basically catatonic … ”), professional turmoil (a certain drug company had put out a certain new product that was causing certain adverse reactions, and Fred felt that the company had been less-than-forthcoming about these potential side effects; plus, Sirius had canceled his radio show; plus plus, there’d been a betrayal in the past by a former employee), unrequited affection (“He was in love with bleep, who’s supposedly straight but … ”). Yet as wild as the conjectures got, not a single person went so far as to suggest that actual foul play was involved, or even actual criminal behavior. And, anyway, deep down, Fred’s friends understand that the blame game is a fool’s game because to play is to lose. Sooner or later the finger’s going to swing around, point right back at them. Why weren’t they there for Fred in his moment of need? Why hadn’t they heeded the warning signs? The self-recrimination will be painful enough. Only it’ll get worse. See, it’s not on themselves that the finger will finally settle. It’s on Fred. He isn’t, after all, just the victim of this crime; he’s the perpetrator as well. It was he who made the decision to sneak off to the garageâ€"people were in the house watching him, no posts were abandonedâ€"not to reach out to any of his friends. Fred murdered Fred. And who wants to be angry at Fred? How unbearably sad to be angry at Fred.

It’s not possible for meâ€"or anyone, probablyâ€"to say definitively why he did it. Who can understand the precise motives of another human being? We’re all, at heart, mysterious, never to be fully fathomed or grasped. That said, there was a general sense among those close to Fred that the household he grew up in was not a very nurturing one. His parents died earlyâ€"his father when Fred was in high school, his mother when he was in medical schoolâ€"and he and his brother were, according to friends, estranged as adults, speaking only on rare occasions. Kyle White, a colorist and longtime friend, tried again and again to get Fred to talk about his family, but he’d always shut the discussion down. “You ask a lot of questions about my family,” he’d say, his way of saying, Don’t. Moreover, Fred did not manage to create a family of his own beyond a friend family and a dog familyâ€"three adopted strays, Benji, Surya, and Tyler. At the end of his life, he was without a partner, and I’m sure loneliness played a huge role in his suicide. Though even that’s a meaningless observation, since loneliness likely plays a huge role in any suicide.

Fred himself may have offered the best insight into his state of mind. During a 2014 interview, he was asked which historical figure he would most like to be.

You may admire somebody but you don’t know what inner turmoil they’re experiencing…. So I don’t want to take anyone’s life. Now if I was reincarnated, that’s a different story. Then I could build my own personality…. I would like to form all the aspects of myself and not have all the external influences of growing up.

So, it wasn’t just on his outer self that Fred wanted a do-over, it was his inner too. His desire, essentially, was to be both Pygmalion and Galatea, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. That, of course, is an impossible dream to realize, and if it were possible, it would probably turn into a nightmare.

But enough of this talk. It feels wrong to close the piece hypothesizing about the reasons Fred might have had for killing himself. That he did shouldn’t be considered his defining moment, since it was an anomalous one. His life was, in all the important ways, a triumph of the comic principle, and if he succumbed to a tragic impulse, it was only at the very end. Fred didn’t have it easy: born to uncongenial parents; on the dweeby-looking side; gay at a time when to be gay was to be on the margins. These are serious handicaps, enough to cause most people to hit the wall or the bottle. But Fred wasn’t just a pure heart, he was a tough cookie too, and somehow that combination saw him through. His talent, his courage, his sheer force of will, allowed him to turn his liabilities into assets, into style, and he became not only a towering figure in his field but the final word in chic: he shaped the looks of so many of those whom we aspire to look like.

And even when it was all gloom and doom with him, it wasn’t. My first novel came out a couple of weeks before Fred died, at which point he’d already fallen down the black hole of depression. I called Rob while he was at work, began to dither on about which passage I should choose for that night’s reading, or the number of people coming or not comingâ€"some Nervous Nelly thing.

Suddenly a voice piped up in the background. It was muffled-sounding, so I couldn’t make out any of the words. But then Rob said, “Fred told me to tell you that when they turn your book into a movie, he wants to play the male lead.”

Once more the voice piped up, and this time I heard it, clear as a bell. “Or the female lead!” And then he let loose with that crazy, beautiful laugh.