Dr. Fredric Brandt in the living room of his Chelsea apartment, in January 2013. Credit: Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
When Madonna was living in London, stuck in the midst of a disintegrating marriage and in need of a man who could still make her feel beautiful, it was Dr. Fredric Brandt who jetted across the Atlantic to cheer her up.
When Marc Jacobs had a photo shoot and thought his face wasn’t quite matching up with the enviably youthful body he had spent so much time working on at the gym, it was Dr. Brandt who inspected him as he sang a show tune, squeezed a little something here or there and sent him on his way.
Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Tomas Maier visited, too. So did Linda Wells, the editor in chief of Allure, the magazine devoted to beauty and trends in plastic surgery and dermatology.
“I did anything he let me do,” she said. “I trusted him implicitly.”
Same for the models Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Stephanie Seymour; the fashion photographers Steven Meisel and Steven Klein; the celebrity hairstylists Garren and Sally Hershberger; and the actress Ellen Barkin.
Not everyone admitted to seeing Dr. Brandt. Occasionally, he would go to restaurants, spot one of his Louboutin-clad socialites and feel a pang of sadness as she picked at her salmon and pretended that, like complex carbohydrates, he didn’t exist.Photo
Dr. Brandt in his office in 1999. CreditElliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos
A few years back, the talk-show host Kelly Ripa invited Dr. Brandt to her 40th birthday party, where he spent much of the evening telling Ms. Barkin, another guest, how surprised he was to be there, given how secretive many people were about having requested his services.
“He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe she invited me because when I go out they make believe they don’t know me,’ ” Ms. Barkin said in an interview last week.
But Ms. Ripa did more than admit going to his office. She also enjoyed his company outside of it.
“There was this exuberant childlike quality about him,” she said Wednesday morning, speaking by phone after the broadcast of her TV show, “Live! With Kelly and Michael.” “I’m not going to say he was typical looking because he wasn’t, but I found him to be perfect. He was a package. This big fun package.”
Unfortunately, as his friends and patients now know, there was another side to Dr. Brandt as well.
Last Sunday, he was found dead in the garage of his Miami home, hanging by a yellow cord, discovered by a friend in what the police determined to be a suicide.
“Ebullient, happy-go-lucky Fred turned out to be more complicated than we realized,” Ms. Barkin said.
Now, she and others are left reeling as they wonder what signs they missed, why a man who had every medical tool at his disposal couldn’t find the ones that may have saved him from himself.
Fredric Brandt definitely wanted to be famous. He had his own radio show on SiriusXM, kept a publicist on retainer and provided heavily discounted treatments to practically every beauty editor with a business card.
Earlier this year, soon after the radio show he had hosted since 2011 was canceled, he had dinner with the producing team of Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (“RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “Million Dollar Listing”), where one of the topics was a possible reality TV show that would report on trends in plastic surgery and do makeovers of people who were disadvantaged in one way or another. He would, of course, be the star.
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It wasn’t a terribly well-pitched idea; ultimately it went nowhere. But he loved being in the public eye, even if it meant having to endure occasional mockery.
And he seemed to have a sense of humor about the strange position he occupied in the celebrity-beauty vortex, too. On the wall of his 34th Street office, for example, was a Steven Klein portrait of Dr. Brandt standing ominously behind a male model at a pool, ready to inject him.
So it was both ironic and tragic that some friends of Dr. Brandt seemed to believe that a cartoonish portrayal of him on the Netflix series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” may have been an exacerbating factor in the depressive episode that led him to take his life.Photo
On the show, Martin Short plays a cosmetic dermatologist whose face is so paralyzed by fillers that he can’t even pronounce his own name, Dr. Grant. The character’s look — peroxide-blond locks; preternaturally plump cheekbones — made the reference to Dr. Brandt unmistakable.
To his patients, Dr. Brandt made light of it.
“He said, ‘Did you see that character,’ ” said Ms. Hershberger, the hairstylist. “He said something like, ‘It’s an extreme version of me.’ He laughed about it. That was his nature.”
But with closer friends, Dr. Brandt brought it up numerous times, in far less lighthearted terms. “He never thought it was funny,” said Kyle White, a colorist at Oscar Blandi Salon. “He was about putting on a happy face in public.” (Mr. Short declined to comment.)
Not everyone in his camp was entirely sympathetic. “I said, ‘If you continue to put stuff in your face, you’re going to have to cope with the fact that some people don’t like it,’ ” said Joan Kron, a longtime friend and patient. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with it. Do I feel bad about that now? Yes. But I try to be honest with my friends.”
It wasn’t the only time he felt ridiculed. Several years ago, W magazine published an article about plastic surgeons and cosmetic dermatologists who are their own worst advertisements and cited him as a prime example.
“The headline was ‘C’est Chic le Freak,’ and there was a pull quote in the middle of the page that said something like, ‘When I see Dr. Brandt’s face, it makes me glad I have wrinkles’ ” Mr. White said.
Even a rather glowing profile in The New York Times turned out to be a mixed blessing.
Friends described him as practically giddy when he first read the article. Then he went online and read all of the 106 reader comments, the majority of which expressed disdain for what he was doing, frequently in strikingly personal terms.
One reader compared him to “an alien from another world cast in a sci-fi film, like Star Trek.” Another wrote, “I wouldn’t let this butcher slice baloney.”
He was devastated.
“We talked about it,” Ms. Barkin said. “I said: ‘Fred, don’t go online. Don’t look at comments.’ I said: ‘Let’s Google my name and see what comes up. You’re going to see ‘A doctor who has not treated Ellen Barkin thinks she had a nose job.’ And underneath that, there’s going to be another that says that she hasn’t had a nose job and should. Another is going to say, ‘Why does Ellen Barkin have so much Botox?’ and one underneath that will say, ‘Why doesn’t Ellen put some Botox around those crow’s-feet?’ These are real comments. We sat there and read them.”
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But Dr. Brandt had a hard time putting her wisdom into practice.Photo
Dr. Brandt with Tony and Sage Robbins in November 2014.CreditAstrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for DuJour
“Fred never developed that hard shell,” Mr. White said. “He was like gauze. That was one of the things that made him so wonderful and it was also part of his undoing. People can be cruel.”
Fredric Brandt was born June 26, 1949, in Newark, where his parents ran a candy store. After high school, he set off for Rutgers University, then moved to medical school in Philadelphia, where he initially focused on oncology.
By 1978, he had moved to Florida, where he completed his residency at the University of Miami, specializing in dermatology, a field of medicine that friends said was far more suited to his personality. He was actually a little shy back then, they said, without the flair that would later define him.
“He was very studious and almost a little nerdy,” said Dr. Roy Geronemus, a dermatologist who knew Dr. Brandt then and later invited him to join his practice in New York. “He knew the literature inside out. He knew what other people were doing. He knew what had been published.”
As Dr. Brandt’s practice grew, he began to spend more time in New York, first taking a room at the Four Seasons hotel and practicing a day or two a month, and then eventually moving in to Dr. Geronemus’s practice on the East Side.
His relationship with Madonna, who met him in the ’90s while she had a house in Miami, became well known and led to appearances on shows like “The View” and “Live With Regis and Kelly.” (Madonna declined to comment for this article.)
“He would come on our show, doing these mom makeovers on Mother’s Day,” Ms. Ripa said. “Whatever the event was, he would volunteer his services. All the women would say they loved looking younger, but it was the way he made them feel just being in his presence that I found remarkable. He was so joyful.”
His increasingly attention-getting outfits only burnished his image. First he was obsessed with Prada, Hedi Slimane (back during his first run at St. Laurent) and Comme des Garçons; after that, Raf Simons, Lanvin and Givenchy. One day he’d walk around the office in a plastic raincoat. On another, he was wearing a skirt over leather pants.
But he remained a studious clinician and diagnostician.
“Yes, I saw that appearance-wise, he was a little unusual,” Joy Behar said. “But he was a great doctor and he was so smart. I was one of the people who happily said I got Botox and that he was my doctor. I’m against plastic surgery. I won’t get the knife, and he did things so that I didn’t need it. ”
And patients felt protective of him. While the volumizers he shot into his face and the fancy clothes he wore on his back made him on some level a testament to global capitalism (office visits frequently ran $6,000 each), his quirkiness and humor were incredibly endearing.
To most of his patients, at least.
Mr. White remembered a visit from Barbra Streisand in which the doctor burst into the song “People” as she sat in the exam room. “She looked at him and said, ‘You’re a strange one, aren’t you,’ ” Mr. White said. (Ken Sunshine, a representative for Ms. Streisand said, “She met him once six or seven years ago but never let him touch her face.”)Photo
Many patients are not sure whom they will turn to now. “A lot of people don’t know what to do,” Ms. Barkin said. “There was Fred and there was every other doctor. He was in a class by himself.”
In recent years, friends said, they began to see signs that Dr. Brandt was having trouble adjusting to some of the less glamorous aspects of his life, one of which was being a single, 65-year-old gay man. He hadn’t been in a relationship since his 20s or 30s.
And some of the things that linked him to his patients — the extreme smoothness of his skin, the European runway outfits — also made it in some ways harder to connect with gay men, the sorts he was interested in.
“I don’t think he was trying to desexualize himself, although maybe that was the result,” Mr. White said.
“I remember once, I was in the Four Seasons and he showed me his closet,” said Daphne Merkin, another friend and patient. “It’s odd to call it that since it was a hotel. But he was very excited about the clothes. It would be an overstatement to say they were like Liberace, but they were all outfits. You wouldn’t just put them on and forget about them.
“ And it passed through my mind that the private him, whoever that was, was getting more and more subsumed. You could almost hear tap dancing. It was like the sad clown or the tears of a clown. That song. He had an impulse to entertain, and he just went and entertained all these women.”
In the winter of 2014, Dr. Brandt’s friend Elizabeth Hayt went to Dr. Brandt’s New York apartment for a last-minute visit. At one point, she said, she went to the bathroom, where she discovered a pile of syringes and needles and blood-stained gauze pads.
“I thought, ‘Oh, Fred, this isn’t a good thing to be doing alone on a Saturday night,’ ” Ms. Hayt said, referring to his use of fillers. “It was disturbing thing, and I didn’t want to think about it.”
In mid-March, Dr. Brandt went to a conference in San Francisco, then headed back to Miami, where friends noticed something was amiss. He wasn’t responding to text messages and phone calls.
Patients in New York with appointments received phone calls from his office saying that Dr. Brandt wasn’t going to make it north for his early April appointments, then heard from the office again saying that actually he was.
Mr. White was one of Dr. Brandt’s last friends in New York who saw him alive.
It was back in March and the two spent an overcast Sunday together, when it was evident to Mr. White that his friend was down.
So he suggested a vacation for the two of them, location to be determined, then sent Dr. Brandt a text later to follow up.
Among other things, it said, “I wish I could help you not be so hard on yourself. All I can tell you is that I think you’re amazing and one of the most kind generous special gifted artists i’ve ever known and I wish I could be half as great as you are in every single aspect of your life. Every person you come in contact with has had their life improved just because of your presence. I’m going to get in bed and look at vacation spots. I love you Fred. Sleep good because the world is a better place with you in it. xxxx.”
Dr. Brandt never replied.
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