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THE RUDI GERNREICH BOOK |
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1956, Chinese waiter jackets in cotton duck. (photograph © Christa, courtesy Life magazine) Pucciani explains Gernreich's reluctance to Uoutu: uTo 'out' yourself is one thing. To be dragged out is something else. Rudi never came out officially. He never felt the need. Until I retired from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1979, I lived by the principle of never make a point of it and never deny it. Intelligent people knew by the way I lived. After my retirement from UCLA I agreed to be interviewed by UCLA's gay newspaper. Rudi knew about the interview, and one morning at breakfast I asked him about it. He told me he thought it was a good interview, but 'why did you let them do It?' I told him that, after all, I was retired, so why notwhat can happen? Then he asked me why I had waited, and I told him it was quite simple-no one had ever asked me. When I asked Rudi why he had never come out, he said with that lilt in his voice he always got when he was joking: 'It's very simple. It's bad for business.' "After his death, I felt I must respect his point of view. The solution came when the American Civil Liberties Union announced that the estates of Rudi Gernreich and Oreste Pucciani had endowed a trust to provide for litigation and education in the area of lesbian and gay rights. So that was Rudi's posthumous 'outing.'" In the early fifties Gernreich's career was not proceeding as successfullv as he had honed. After a temporary job designing for a Beverly Hills shop called Matthews, he met Walter Bass, and in 1952 began an eight-year business associa tion. "There was no other chance for me at that moment," Gernreich said of this period. " I just kept running into walls. Then Walter came along and somehow, though we never got along and I knew it would be a doomed association, everything jelled."
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