Some blame designer Halston’s epic fall—from a superstar empire builder to a man fired from his own brand—on drugs, Studio 54 excess, and bad business decisions. Others blame Victor Hugo, the Venezuelan sex worker Halston met in 1972, dated for over a decade, and followed down a path of reckless destruction.
Halston, the subject of Ryan Murphy’s eponymous new limited series starring Ewan McGregor in the title role, had boyfriends before Hugo. The most notable of them was Ed Austin (played onscreen by Sullivan Jones), a handsome menswear buyer McGregor’s Halston picks up within the first five minutes of the series in a meet-cute ripped almost directly from real life. But when that relationship fizzled, according to Simply Halston—the Steven Gaines biography on which Netflix’s series is based—the designer took to calling escorts. As Gaines writes:
The 24-year-old told Halston that his name was Victor Hugo—a pun on his anatomy, rather than an homage to the French writer and poet responsible for Les Misérables. (“Believe me, he wasn’t reading French literature,” sniped former Vogue editor André Leon Talley in a recent interview with the New York Times.)
“It was pure lust. I think Halston had a life that was barren of romance and tenderness,” Gaines told Vanity Fair. Halston derived warmth from his friendships with women like Liza Minnelli and Elsa Peretti; his attraction to Hugo, Gaines theorized to Logo, was more complicated. “Halston liked being humiliated and having the shock value of having Victor around,” he said. “It was a whole other side to Halston…. Halston liked to be on the shocking end of things. Victor would show up at Studio 54 wearing a hose over his dick. And he pissed and came on canvases for Andy Warhol…. Victor also ended up being ill and had no respect for anything. He thought he was untouchable.”
Though Halston could be cold, cutting, and imperious later in his career, Hugo—a brash, entitled user and Warhol entourage figure—proved to be Halston’s kryptonite. “He couldn’t get rid of him,” Gaines told V.F. “And believe me, Victor wouldn’t let him go.”
The year after Halston met Hugo, the designer was arguably at the top of his career—grossing nearly $30 million in retail sales, having amassed three prestigious Coty Awards (a fashion world predecessor to the CFDA Awards), and being deemed “one of the greats” by Women’s Wear. “Halston’s money and Hugo’s appetite for excess made the pair an accident waiting to happen,” mused Telegraph in a retrospective published in 2001.
Halston moved Hugo into his home, put him on the company payroll, and eventually let his boyfriend dress the windows of his boutique—even though Halston’s previous boyfriend, Austin, was already doing that job. The conflict between them came to a head during the Christmas season of 1973, when Halston had Hugo redecorate a window Austin had designed.
“I was fired. Christmas Eve, thank you—out the door, no severance, nothing,” Austin told Gaines, revealing that he never saw the designer again.
In the mid-’70s, Halston was under tremendous pressure, as his empire expanded into fragrance, luggage, menswear, lingerie, and handbags. He was primed for a release valve when Studio 54 opened in 1977—and Halston jumped headfirst into the new venue, changing his office hours to cater to his partying schedule and supporting Hugo as he played host to lavish after-parties at Halston’s Upper East Side townhome. The parties, according to the New York Post, featured “man-on-man orgies late into the night [that Andy] Warhol enjoyed photographing from the sidelines.” As publicist R. Couri Hay told the Post, “Victor had the keys to the safe with the cocaine.”
“Victor was a destructive force,” said longtime Vanity Fair special correspondent Bob Colacello in 2019’s Halston documentary. “Andy did Victor’s portraits. He did two. One day he shows up, and the painting is completely covered with graffiti. [Victor] had painted over them, thinking that this was taking Andy’s art to another level. And Andy was really mad. He was like, ‘Don’t think I’m doing new ones, Victor.’”
When Halston and Hugo stopped sleeping together, the fashion designer turned to other escorts like Robert Rogers, “an unassuming Black man of medium height and build in his late twenties who was one of Manhattan’s most successful male prostitutes,” wrote Gaines.
But Halston could not completely cut off his former partner—even when Hugo began stealing from him to fund his drug habit. “He stole some Warhols, but he also took the sterling silver Elsa Peretti candlesticks on the table,” Gaines told V.F., revealing that Halston continued to bankroll Hugo’s lifestyle after they broke up—paying for his housing and writing him checks.
“The person that Halston loved, more than his own life, was Victor,” Halston’s personal assistant Peruchio Valls told Gaines. Halston’s friend Sassy Johnson had another take on the relationship.
“My theory has always been that Halston came from an alcoholic family, that his father had a problem,” said Johnson in 2019’s Halston. “And that Halston recreated his family life with Victor as the dysfunctional person who is constantly going to keep everything off balance.”
“I think that’s probably a very good analysis,” said Gaines, explaining that Halston’s father did “pretty horrible things” to the family when they were growing up in Evansville, Indiana—including to Halston’s sister and brother. “And they weren’t gay. I think Halston had a very, very, very tough time. I can’t imagine what it was like for a gay little boy to be there.”
After Halston was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, he moved to San Francisco to be closer to his family—and to get away from Hugo. Halston’s niece Lesley Frowick told People that in Halston’s final years, “He tolerated [Hugo], but he was trouble.”
Even after Halston’s 1990 death, Hugo continued to try to make money off the designer, according to Gaines. “Victor absolutely would not give me an interview unless I paid him. All the money just went up his nose and on crazy spending and destructive stuff.”
Three decades later, Halston’s friends still point fingers at Hugo for his negative influence on the designer.
“That Venezuelan call boy was his downfall,” longtime Talley told the New York Times. “He was a grifter who clung on like a parasite, like a barnacle on a ship.”
And in 2019’s Halston documentary, filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng asked the designer’s illustrator and confidant Joe Eula for his analysis of the destructive relationship. Eula minced no words.
“Why did Halston put up with Victor?” Tcheng asks.
“Because he was in love with him,” Eula replies.
“When did it fall apart?” Tcheng presses.
“The day they met,” Eula responds, without hesitation.
In making Netflix’s Halston, though, the series creators wanted to make Hugo (played by Gian Franco Rodriguez) a fully dimensional character—and director/executive producer Daniel Minahan went to great lengths to understand him.
“Victor was the hardest character to write because he was a disruptor,” Minahan told Vanity Fair, revealing that he spoke to fashion designer and Halston protégé Naeem Khan before filming. Khan told him that “despite all of his insanity and the disruption, Victor was a person who could make you see things in a different way.”
“Because Halston and Hugo met in this transactional way, when Victor was a hustler, at least in our story, the dynamic is that Halston is never sure whether he can fully trust Victor,” explained Minahan. “He doesn’t know whether Victor really loves him, or whether he’s there for the privilege and the money. And I think Victor is not sure whether Halston really loves him because he met him as a prostitute. I think it’s this really loaded sort of dynamic between the two of them.”
“I think Victor got so deep into his addiction and so overwhelmed and drunk off the attention they were getting that he became a really destructive force,” continued Minahan. “I think maybe Victor, in the beginning, was the person who could tell Halston the truth about things. But then that became something more manipulative. Their relationship is a sad story. But I think we kind of try to capture the excitement of it and the danger of it, and then finally the dysfunction of it.”
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