This is particularly hard to do when you’re a control-freak designer who spends his nights at Studio 54 and his days in his workroom snorting a never-ending line of cocaine.
By this point in the series, the Halston the public knows is in full display.
The episode offers snippets of all the A-list revelry that was photographed, and not photographed, inside the exclusive space.
It turns out the receiver is just full of all the cocaine that slipped off while he was snorting the drug while taking calls.
Elsa boasts about the success she’s having at Tiffany, and he screams that she owes everything to him, eventually culminating in a larger fight toward the end of the episode where she calls him the F-word.
Back in New York, he mourns alone in his house as Calvin Klein’s Brooke Shields jeans commercial comes on the TV.
David Mahoney at Norton Simon had been begging Halston to get into the designer-jeans market, and he had balked at such a gauche idea .
As Halston accosts David at his home, saying that he broke their agreement that David would never leave him, he also realizes that the JC Penney venture was a set-up and the brand may have been cut even if David had succeeded.
With Halston now beholden to a number-cruncher who doesn’t care for elaborate orchid displays and declarations that food shipped from the Olympic Tower office to Montauk counts as a business expense, this relationship will not go as breezily as the one with David.
But in this case — and I don’t want to sound like I’m worming out of this, because it’s something I did think a lot about — I suppose ultimately I felt like it was just one part of who he was.” This episode not only discusses Halston’s relationship with Victor Hugo, but also shows them hiring photographers to capture their sex parties at his townhouse and his dalliances at Studio 54.
• Red is taking over the screen of Halston, and not just in his wardrobe or in the Olympic Tower workspace .