For women of a certain age and a certain disposable income, who were in search of the fountain of youth, the cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt—universally known as Fred—was the go-to man. His adoring patients, from Madonna to your chic next-door neighbor who looked not a day past forty, flocked to Brandt’s office, on East Thirty-fourth Street, willingly paying up to seven thousand dollars a visit for a full set of fillers on the order of Juviderm, Restylane, Dysport, and Botox. In return, they got the full blast of Brandt’s attention—though, admittedly, they often waited hours on end in his examining rooms, given his overbooked schedule. (I, for one, could never figure out, when I went to his office to interview him for stories—and, on a few occasions, to try some of his rejuvenation magic for myself—whether he systematically underestimated the amount of time he would need to spend on each patient, or whether he was simply too good-hearted to turn away anyone desperate for a bit of facial tweaking.)
Brandt, who died last Sunday at his home in Miami, at the age of sixty-five, had small, deft hands and a sure touch. Considering that his procedures caused a certain amount of discomfort or pain, I was always struck by the party atmosphere he brought to the proceedings. When he finally arrived in the examining room, he would greet his patients gleefully, asking, “What are we going to do today?” Once he got under way, he would sing show tunes, dropping in a bit of Yiddish—“A bissel of Bo!”—to distract them from the onslaught of needles. It was as if he had figured out that the best ways to approach the whole fraught business of treating women’s appearances, in a culture that both fetishized looks and mocked women for obsessing about them, was through humor and self-deprecation. For anxious patients, this attitude was reassuring in more ways than one: it dispelled feelings of guilt at being vain enough to seek out Fred’s ministrations, and it conveyed that he was cognizant that what he did wasn’t all that serious—it wasn’t brain surgery, for instance, although to some women it might have felt as important.
His modest, slightly geeky manner notwithstanding, Brandt was something of a trailblazer among cosmetic dermatologists. Thanks, in large part, to his innovative ideas about aging and facial structure, using fillers to add volume to the face came to be seen as an adjunct to—and, in some cases, a replacement for—going under the knife. Beneath his happy-go-lucky persona, Brandt was a dedicated researcher. He was instrumental in getting certain fillers approved by the F.D.A., and he found new methods of using them, such as injecting Botox to tighten the neck. He was committed to discovering and combining anti-aging agents, both natural and manufactured, and he devised instruments to more accurately and less painfully deliver subcutaneous fillers. He also oversaw an ever-expanding skin-care line, with products that sought to duplicate some of his methods in a topical form.
I still remember our initial encounter, which took place at E.A.T. café, on Madison Avenue, more than a decade ago. From his intimate conversational style to his raucous, uninhibited laugh, I found him out of the box in every way. At the time we met, I was writing an article about the vicissitudes of aging. He had been recommended as a good person to talk to about staving off wrinkles and sagging jawlines. Although Brandt was involved in what many might see as a frivolous process of beautification, he immediately struck me as unsuperficial—as someone in touch with the deeper currents of life. There was also something vulnerable, even fragile, about him that I responded to—a sense that he had fought hard to get where he was, and that success hadn’t calcified him but, on the contrary, made him all the more modest about himself, and generous about other people’s travails.
As I got to know Fred better, I saw sides of him beyond the driven, relentlessly cheerful person he was at the office. We talked about his lonely-sounding childhood in New Jersey; the early deaths of his parents, with whom he had not been close; and his sense, while growing up, that he was different from other kids. He was thin-skinned about his own appearance, and he tinkered with it continually. His increasingly bizarre looks invited snide comments in the press well before Martin Short parodied him on the TV show “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (an event that has been linked to his suicide), and he could be driven to tears by a slight or insult, personal or professional. I think this sensitivity served him well as a doctor who saw women at their most vulnerable. It enabled him to make his patients feel better about themselves, not just through his technical skill but also through his inherent kindness. But it also left him wide open to the slings and arrows.
For people who didn’t know Brandt beyond his perky persona, it must seem puzzling that someone so vivacious and accomplished would take his own life. Fred had thriving practices in Florida and New York, a globally popular product line, a sparkling white home in Coral Gables that housed a dazzling art collection as well as the three rescue dogs he slept with at night. He had drivers, cooks, private yoga teachers, and a vast collection of friends, which included regular folk as well as the glitterati who numbered among his patients. What he didn’t have in the end, I think, was enough of the armor that keeps life from feeling like a too-painful business.When I first heard the news of Brandt’s sudden death last Sunday evening, from a publicist friend who had represented him for a number of years, I was told that the cause was an unspecified, long-standing illness. I immediately blurted out my first thought—that he had killed himself—and I was sad but not surprised when my hunch was confirmed the next morning. The man who was so good at making women look and feel beautiful never left off feeling like a wallflower himself—overlooked at the dance, ever alert to the snickers of passersby.
